^^.^.^ 






» ♦^•V. '■ 







'• %^^ '■ 












O 4 







^0 




♦ 







' V V> V 




. ^'L 



%.^<i 









EVERYDAY AMERICANS 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 



BY 

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 

Author of "College Sons and College Fathers," 

*'Our House," "Education by 

Violence," etc. 




y 



NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1920 






Copyright, 1919, 1920, by 
The Century Co. 



©CU57G518 



PREFACE 

This IS emphatically not a war book ; and yet 
the chapters that follow, in one sense, are the 
fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent 
reflections upon his own people by one return- 
ing to a familiar environment after active con- 
tact with English, Scottish, Irish, and French 
in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They 
are complementary, in a way, to a volume of 
essays which sprang from that experience and 
was published in 1919 under the title "Edu- 
cation by Violence/' But though representing 
in its inception the fresher view of familiar 
America of one returning from abroad, this 
book in its completed form is tendered as a 
modest attempt to depict an American type 
that was sharpened perhaps, but certainly not 
created by the war. The ''old Americans'' 
came to racial consciousness many years ago, 

v 



PREFACE 

although their sense of nationality has been im- 
measurably strengthened by the events of the 
last few years. It is no picture of all America, 
no survey of our complete social being that I 
attempt in the following pages; but rather a 
highly personal study of the typical, the every- 
day American mind, as it is manifested in the 
American of the old stock. It is a study of 
what that typical American product, the col- 
lege and high school graduate, has become in 
the generation which must carry on after the 
war. 

New Haven, Connecticut, 
June 4, 1920. 



VI 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I The American Mind . 

II Conservative America 

III Radical America . 

IV American Idealism 

V Religion in America . 

VI Literature in America 

VII The Bourgeois American 



PAGE 

3 

29 
61 

91 
120 
149 

175 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

CHAPTER I 

THE AMERICAN MIND 

IN England there developed long ago, per- 
haps as far back as the days of Shake- 
speare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and 
democratic in his sympathies, a curious political 
animal called the radical-conservative. The 
radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once 
said, is a man who would have been a radical 
outright if radicals had not been dissenters ; by 
which he clearly meant that the species agreed 
with radical principles, but objected to radicals 
because they did not have good manners, sel- 
dom played cricket, and never belonged to the 
best clubs. Therefore the radical-conserva- 
tive stays in his own more congenial class while 

3 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

working for social justice toward all other 
classes. He is willing to vote with the con- 
servative party in return for concessions in 
labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguard- 
ing of public health. 

Thence arises the curious circumstance, most 
mystifying to foreigners, that a good share of 
the really progressive legislation in Great Bri- 
tain of the last half-century has been led by 
young gentlemen from Oxford and Cam- 
bridge who have no more intention of becom- 
ing part of the proletariate than of leaving off 
their collars and going without baths. Bis- 
marck was an out-and-out conservative who 
for his own nefarious ends furthered what a 
Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory 
would call radical measures. But Lord Rob- 
ert Cecil in our own day is a convinced aris- 
tocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who 
is more sincerely effective than many Liberals 
in various movements which we are accus- 
tomed to call reform. 

4 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

The conservative-liberal is quite a different 
animal and far commoner, far more familiar to 
Americans, even if they have never called him 
by that name. His habitat is America, and 
thanks to the populousness of this country, he 
is beginning to have a very important influence 
outside of his habitat. To define him is diffi- 
cult, but for purposes of rough classification he 
may be said to be the man whose native liberal 
instincts have been crystallized by a combina- 
tion of interesting circumstances — and some- 
times petrified. He is the man who was born 
a liberal in a liberal country and intends to 
remain as he was born. He is the man who 
will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the 
Declaration of Independence against any later 
manifestation of the revolutionary spirit. He 
believes in conserving in unaltered purity the 
principles of life, government, and industry 
that his forefathers rightly believed to be lib- 
eral. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned 
policeman, a progressive who stands pat upon 

5 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

his progress, a conservative-liberal. I believe 
that he is our closest approximation to a typi- 
cal American mind. 

Whether familiar or not, the effects of this 
political disease — for it is a disease, a harden- 
ing of the arteries of the mind — are easily ob- 
servable all about us in the America of to-day. 
Indeed, we see them so frequently that they 
awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in 
any intellectual sense of the word. They are 
like our clear atmosphere, our mixture of races, 
our hurried steps — things we scarcely notice 
until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an 
outsider. I am so much a part of America 
that I find it difficult to detach myself from a 
mood that is mine in common with many other 
Americans. And yet, once one sees it plainly, 
the educated conservatism of liberal America 
becomes portentous, a unique political pheno- 
menon. 

I think that this peculiarity of our political 
thinking first became evident to me on an ocean 

6 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

voyage In war-time. There were a score or so 
of Americans on board, members, most of 
them, of various government missions, picked 
business men, picked professional men, thor- 
oughly intelligent, intensely practical, and en- 
tirely American. They were democratic, too, 
as we use the word in America; that is, good 
"mixers," free from snobbery, and nothing new 
in action was alien to their sympathies. They 
could remold you a business or a legal prac- 
tice in half an hour's conversation; tear down 
an organization and build it up again between 
cigars. Their committee meetings went off 
like machine-guns, whereas the English offi- 
cers and trade diplomats, when they got to- 
gether, snarled themselves in set speeches and 
motions and took an afternoon to get anywhere. 
The English, indeed, seemed puzzled and a 
little dazed by the ease with which the Ameri- 
cans seized upon and put through reorganiza- 
tion of any kind. They seemed positively to 
leap at change, so long as basic ideas were not 

7 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

involved. ''Nothing/' said an Indian colonel, 
"is sacred to them. They would scrap the em- 
pire and build a new one — on paper — at sixty 
miles an hour." 

He was quite wrong. The system my coun- 
trymen lived by permitted change, urged 
change, up to a certain point. They would 
demolish a ten-story building to erect one of 
twenty or scrap thousands of machines in order 
to adopt a better process, but when it came to 
principles and institutions they were conserva- 
tive. The founders of their social and politi- 
cal order had been almost a century ahead of 
the times. The instruments of life and of 
government they had provided had served with 
slight modifications for the free-moving 
America of the nineteenth century. It had 
been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, 
to realize the liberality and democracy possible 
under the Constitution, to work out the inde- 
pendence available for the common man in a 
rich and undeveloped country in which his 

8 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

political power guaranteed him every advan- 
tage that could be gained in a capitalistic sys- 
tem, including the acquisition of capital. It 
had been a splendid game, and our wits had 
been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, 
our prosperity fortified, our self-confidence 
enormously increased in playing it. Given our 
rules, we could play the game more resource- 
fully than any other people on earth. And 
they were wise rules, which provided for 
growth, but not for a dififerent kind of contest. 
We were so sure that America stood for free- 
dom, independence, and liberality in general 
that we could not take seriously people who 
did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that 
there might be an idea of democracy dififerent 
from our own. 

Indeed, on board that ship, a curious ex- 
perience came to all of us. Englishmen, Ameri- 
cans, and I, the humble observer, when in the 
course of argument or conference the theories 
of life upon which we were variously living 

9 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

came momentarily into view. The Ameri- 
cans, it was clear, were certain that they were 
the most progressive people in the world. This 
certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman 
Catholic; it gave them elasticity and daring. 
Being sure of their principles, so sure as to be 
almost unaware of them, they ignored prece- 
dents, and solved or dismissed problems with 
equal ease. They made plans for a league of 
nations, they approved of a temporary au- 
tocracy for the President, they put the labor 
question on a business basis, and so disposed 
of it ; they were afraid of nothing but a failure 
to act and act quickly. Nevertheless, as they 
talked and worked with the English, it became 
increasingly evident that their road ended in 
a wall. 

There were walls on the English road, too — 
walls of caste thinking and social privilege that 
seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an of- 
fice building. Our wall was invisible to most 
of us, and as a body we never tried to pass it 

lO 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas, 
beyond which, if we thought of it at all, pre- 
sumably lay socialism, anarchy, chaos. 

Just that far the American mind, like some 
light tank, ran, surmounting everything, taking 
to the fields if the road was blocked, turning, 
backing, doing everything but stop; only to 
halt dead at the invisible barrier, and zigzag 
away again. By such a free-moving process 
within the limits of law we had scrambled 
across a continent in turbulent, individualistic 
exploitation, and yet had built a sound politi- 
cal system carefully and well. And there we 
had stopped, convinced that we had solved the 
problem of democracy and equal opportunity 
for all. This explains why America is twenty 
years behind the best of Europe in social and 
economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed 
reform more than we did). This is what it is 
to be a conservative-liberal. 

The Englishman is different. He is much 
more likely to be an obstinate Tory, blocking 

II 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by a 
system as antiquated as feudalism ; or if not a 
Tory, then an out-and-out radical eager for a 
legal revolution. But in either case he knows 
what different-minded men are thinking; and if 
there is a wall on his road, he looks over it. If 
he is a Tory, he understands radicalism and 
fights it because he prefers an inequality that 
favors him to a more logical system that might 
be personally disagreeable. If he is a radical, 
he understands Toryism. But the American 
conservative-liberal acknowledges no opinion 
except his own. He insists, in the words 
of a contemporary statesman, that the 
American system, as founded by our fore- 
fathers, is the best in the world, and he is not 
interested in others. There are a thousand 
proofs that it is not the best possible system 
even for America, and plenty of them are in 
print — proofs advanced by capitalists as well 
as labor leaders, by Catholics as well as social- 
ists; but they do not trouble him, because he 

12 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

neither hears nor reads them. It is easier to 
call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik. 

This is the liberal-conservative mind that 
will not look beyond its own fixed principles and 
refuses to understand those who differ from 
it; that suffers a kind of paralysis when con- 
fronted by genuine radicalism. The Ameri- 
can college undergraduate has it to perfection. 
Bubbling over with energy, ready for anything 
in the practical world of struggle or adventure, 
he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he 
has inherited as a girl of her reputation. He 
is armored against new thinking. The Ameri- 
can business man fairly professes it. He 
speculates in material things with an abandon 
that makes a Frenchman pale; but new prin- 
ciples in the relations of trade to general wel- 
fare, questions of unearned increment, first 
bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him. 

And yet the college undergraduates, after 
hatching, and the American business man have 
made for us a very comfortable America, just 

13 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

now the safest place in the world to live in, the 
most prosperous country in the world, the 
most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way 
of doing things has its great advantages. 
America is its product, and the ranter who de- 
scribes the United States as the home of super- 
capitalism, a sink of cheaply exploited labor, a 
dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity, does not 
seem to be able to persuade even himself that 
the United States is not the best of all coun- 
tries for a permanent residence. 

And the great Americans of the past have 
nearly all been conservative-liberals. Wash- 
ington was a great republican ; he was also es- 
sentially an aristocrat in social and economic 
relations, who kept slaves and did not believe 
in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically, was 
the greatest of English-speaking democrats, 
but he let the privileged classes exploit the 
working-man and the soldier, partly in order to 
win the war, chiefly because problems of wages 
and unearned increments and economic priv- 

14 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

ilege generally did not enter into his scheme of 
democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for 
the square deal in public and private life, but 
hesitated and at last turned back when it be- 
came evident that a deal that was completely 
square meant the overturning of social life as 
he knew and loved it in America. 

And these men we feel were right. Their 
duty was to make possible a good government 
and a stable society, and they worked not with 
theories only, but also with facts as they were. 
The Germans have argued that the first duty 
of the state is self-preservation, and that rights 
of individual men and other states may properly 
be crushed in order to preserve it. We have 
crushed the Germans and, one hopes, their phil- 
osophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of 
society to preserve itself. No one believes that 
universal sufifrage for all, negroes included, 
would have been advisable in Washington's 
day, when republicanism was still an experi- 
ment. No one believes, I fancy, that the mini- 

15 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

mum wage, the inheritance tax, and coopera- 
tive management should have had first place, or 
indeed any place, in the mind of the Lincoln of 
1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a social- 
ist would have been as useful to the United 
States as Roosevelt the Progressive with a 
back-throw toward the ideals of the aristo- 
cratic state; as Roosevelt the conservative- 
liberal. 

But too great reliance on even a great tra- 
dition has its disadvantages. I know an 
American preparatory school that for many 
college generations has entered its students at 
a famous university with the highest of ex- 
amination records, and a reputation for cour- 
tesy and cleanness of mind and soundness of 
body scarcely paralleled elsewhere. I have 
watched these boys with much interest, and I 
have seen them in surprising numbers gradually 
decline from their position of superiority as 
they faced the rapid changes of college life, as 
they settled into a new environment with differ- 

16 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

ent demands and more complex standards. 
They leaned too heavily upon their admirable 
schooling; they were too confident of the 
strength and worth of their tradition; they 
looked backward instead of forward, and stood 
still while less favored men went on. Their 
fault was the fault of American liberalism, 
which stands pat with Washington and Roose- 
velt and Lincoln. 

Perhaps the greatest teacher in nineteenth- 
century American universities was William 
Graham Sumner. In his day he was called a 
radical, and unsuccessful efforts were made to 
oust him from his professorship because of his 
advocacy of free trade. Now I hear him cited 
as a conservative by those who quote his sup- 
port of individualism against socialism, his 
distrust of cooperation against the league of 
nations. His friends forget that an honest 
radical in one age would be an honest radical 
in another; and that the facts available hav- 
ing changed, it is certain that his opinions 

17 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

would change also, although just what he would 
advocate, just how decide, we cannot certainly 
know. Is it probable that Dante, the great ad- 
vocate of imperial control in a particularistic 
medieval world, would have been a pro-German 
in 1 914? The American liberal who proclaims 
himself of the party of Lincoln, and is content 
with that definition, might have an unpleasant 
shock if that great reader of the heart of the 
common man could resume his short-cut life. 
Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same 
disadvantages as inherited money: all the 
owner has to do is to learn how to keep it ; in 
other words, to become a conservative. That 
is what is going on in America. While we 
were pioneers in liberty and individualism, 
wealth and opportunity and independence were 
showered upon us, and although wealth for the 
average man is harder to come by, and oppor- 
tunity is more and more limited to the for- 
tunate, and independence belongs only to good 
incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal 

18 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

keeps the pioneer's optimism, and is satisfied to 
take ready-made a system that his ancestors 
wrought by painful and open-minded experi- 
ment. In practice he is still full of initiative 
and invention; in principle he can conceive of 
only one dispensation, the ideas of political 
democracy which were the radicalism of 1861 
and 1840 and 1789 and 1776. 

Suppose that he could conceive of industrial 
democracy, of a system where every man be- 
gan with an equal share of worldly privilege 
as he begins now with an equal share of 
worldly rights. Would he not work it out, 
with his still keen practicality, and test its 
value precisely as he tests a new factory method 
or an advertising scheme? But he can- 
not conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispen- 
sation. His liberalism turns conservative at 
the thought. It was different with political 
democracy and with religious toleration. The 
first cannot even now be said to be precisely a 
perfect system, and the second has left us per- 

19 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

ilously near to having no religion at all. Nev- 
ertheless, the liberal ancestor of our American 
never doubted that they were his problems, to 
be worked out to some solution. He followed 
boldly where they led. 

What has happened to the political and eco- 
nomic thinking of many an American much 
resembles what has happened to his religion. 
He learns at church a number of ethical prin- 
ciples which would make him very uneasy if 
put into practice. He learns the virtue of 
poverty, the duty of self-sacrifice, the necessity 
of love for his fellow-man. Now, saintly 
poverty has not become an ideal in America — 
certainly not in New York or Iowa or Atlantic 
City — nor is self-sacrifice common among cor- 
porations, or love a familiar attribute of the 
practice of law. Does the American therefore 
eschew the ethics of Christianity? On the 
contrary. Religion is accepted at its tradi- 
tional value. The church grows richer and 
more influential — within limits. The plain 

20 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

man keeps all his respects for religion as an 
ideal; but he regards it precisely as an ideal, a 
formula beautiful in its perfection, not to be 
sullied by too close an application, not to be 
worked out into new terms to fit a new life. 

And that is just what the conservative-lib- 
eral does with the vigorous liberalism of his 
forefathers. He buries it in his garden, and 
expects to dig it up after many days, a bond 
with coupons attached. He has accepted it as 
the irrevocable word of Jehovah establishing 
the metes and bounds wherein he shall think. 
It is his creed; and like the creeds of the 
church, the further one gets from its origins, 
the greater the repugnance to change. He 
stands by the declaration of his forefathers; 
stands pat, and begs to be relieved of further 
abstract discussion. Business is pressing; con- 
troversy is bad for business ; ideas are bad for 
business; change is bad for business: let well 
enough alone. 

But by all odds the most important fact as 

21 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

regards this conservative-liberal mind of which 
I have been writing remains to be stated, and 
that is its success, for it is now the prevailing 
mind in America. As our soldiers in France, 
though bearing Italian names, Irish names, 
Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet 
and uniform looked all, or nearly all, like the 
physical type we call American, so in this con- 
fusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, 
polylingual, built upon fragments of the em- 
pires of England and Spain and Russia and 
France, there is indubitably a mental type 
which we may call with some confidence Ameri- 
can, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its 
instincts conservative. 

Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demon- 
strable that this American mental type is the 
most definite national entity to be found any- 
where in the Western world. I know that 
this sounds paradoxical. We have heard 
much for several years now of the lack of 
homogeneity in America. We felt in 1914 our 

22 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

German- Americans cleave away from us (to 
be sure, they came back) ; we saw in 1918 and 
19 1 9 the radical socialist and the I. W. W. and 
the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms 
that were certainly not American as the 'nine- 
ties knew America. We began to realize that 
the immigrant changes his language more 
quickly than his mores, and frequently changes 
neither. All this is true. And yet, in spite of 
it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at 
things which we know so well in America 
comes nearer to being a definite national 
psychology that acts in expected fashions, has 
qualities that you can describe as I have been 
describing them, and characteristics common 
to all varieties of it, than either the ''British 
mind" or the "French mind" of which we write 
glibly. 

For the British mind includes the Irish, 
which is as different from the English as a 
broncho from a dray-horse. It includes the 
Tory mind and the Liberal mind, which in 

23 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

England are as dissimilar as were Jefferson 
Davis and Abraham Lincoln. It includes, if 
we use it loosely, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. 
Asquith and H. G. Wells, each of whom repre- 
sents a considerable British constituency. 
And they could no more think alike on any 
topic on the earth below or the heavens above 
than a Turk, a Greek, and a Jew. Certain 
fundamental attitudes would unite all three of 
these latter if they were civilized: they would 
all eat with knives and forks. And in the same 
fashion certain definite racial traits unite the 
Britons aforementioned. But the differences 
imposed by social caste or diverging political 
and social philosophies are far greater than 
anything to be found in everyday America, 
which latter I define as lying between the 
fringe of recent immigrants on the one hand 
and the excrescences of Boston intellectual 
aristocrats or New York radical intellectuals 
on the other. 

Is there a 'Trench mind"? Intellectually 
24 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

and esthetically, perhaps yes. Politically and 
socially, to a less degree of uniformity than can 
be found in America. From the simple homo- 
geneity of France, as we casuals see it, has 
crystallized out the aristocracy and much of the 
church, whose respective parties differ not 
merely as regards the policy of the Govern- 
ment, but are still opposed to that Government 
itself. 

The United States, far more heterogeneous 
in race, far less fixed in national character, 
threatened by its masses of aliens, who are in 
every sense unabsorbed, is yet much more 
homogeneous in its thinking. In America 
weekly magazines for men and women spread 
everywhere and through every class but the 
lowest, and so does this conservative-liberalism 
in politics and social life which I have tried to 
define. In Connecticut and Kansas and Ari- 
zona it is displayed in every conversation, as 
our best known national weekly (itself con- 
servative-liberal) is displayed on every news- 

25 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

stand. Irrespective of racial or financial dif- 
ferences, everywhere in America, between the 
boundaries I have already indicated — the alien 
immigrant on one hand, the advanced intellect- 
ual on the other — nine out of ten of us are 
conservative-liberals ; everywhere, indeed, 
throughout the American bourgeoisie, which 
with us includes skilled laborer and farmer, 
professional man and millionaire. 

And the mental habits of this contemporary 
American are of more than local importance. 
We who are just now so afraid of internation- 
alism are more likely than any other single 
agency to bring it about. Our habits of travel, 
our traverse of class lines, our American way 
of doing things, are perhaps the nearest ap- 
proximation of what the world seems likely to 
adopt as a modern habit if the old aristocracies 
break down everywhere, if easy transportation 
becomes general, if there is widespread educa- 
tion, if Bolshevism does not first turn our 
whole Western system upside down. Already 

26 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

in newspapers and books, in theaters and poli- 
tics, in social intercourse and in forms of music 
and language, one sees all through Western 
Europe (and, they say, also in the East) the 
American mode creeping in, to be welcomed or 
cursed according to circumstances. And those 
great interna'tional levelers, the movies, are 
American in plot and scene and idea and man- 
ners from one end to the other of a film that 
stretches round the world. 

Thus the American mind is worth troubling 
about; and if politically, socially, economically 
the spirit that we and the foreigners call Amer- 
ican has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is 
time to awake. In liberalism inheres our vital- 
ity, our initiative, our strength. Its stagna- 
tion, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves 
of freedom sweeping upward from the masses 
and on in broken and muddy torrents through 
the world are poignant dangers. We must 
open eyes; we must change our ground; we 
must fight the evil in the new revolution, but 

27 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

welcome the good. Our own revolution lies 
before the deluge ; it is no longer enough to go 
on ; it is not now the sufficing document of a po- 
litical philosophy. We must not stop with 
Washington and Lincoln. We must go on 
where the conservative Washington and the 
ra'di'cal Lincoln would lead if they were 
our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism is 
good, and Toryism or radicalism have their 
uses; but conservative-liberalism, preserved, 
desiccated, museum liberalism, long continued 
in, is death to the minds that maintain it. 



28 



CHAPTER II 

CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

THERE is one experience that conserva- 
tive-liberal America — bourgeois Amer- 
ica, the pushing America that gets what it 
wants on this side of the ocean — possesses in 
common, and that is its education. We of the 
vast American middle class have all been to 
high school, or we have lived with high school 
graduates; we have all been to college, or we 
have worked with college graduates. Our 
education, when viewed with any detachment, 
is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given 
generation most of us have studied the same 
textbooks in mathematics and geography and 
history, read the same selections in literature, 
been inoculated with the same ethical principles 
from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a 

29 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

question as to what makes right or wrong, as 
the President did in his war messages, and we 
will respond with a universal roar, like factory 
whistles when a button is punched on some cele- 
bratio'n day. 

This general American experience is largely 
responsible for the tenacity with which we of 
this generation blindly conserve the liberal 
principles of our ancestors, even while we keep 
them, like the tables of the ten commandments, 
safe from the rude touch of practical exper- 
ience. Education such as ours seldom fails to 
influence men's ways of thinking even when 
their actions pass beyond its control. The in- 
fluence, however, is too often ineffectual, blood- 
less. That is a lesson we need to ponder in 
America. 

Education in these colonies in the eighteenth 
century was bent toward theology. All but 
the lower schools, if, indeed, they could be ex- 
cepted, were contrived to find and to train the 
pastor, the minister to the people. For him 

30 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

those studies that influence opinion — history, 
ethics — were chiefly taught. For his purposes, 
the languages of the classics were chiefly 
studied. It was the pastor that emerged as 
prime product of academies and colleges. And 
therefore theology, that arduous intellectual 
exercise for which he prepared, set its mark up- 
on all intellects down to the humblest. We 
wonder at the obsession with religious thinking 
that the letters and diaries of farmers, mer- 
chants, and lawyers of our eighteenth century 
display to the amazement of their very untheo- 
logical descendants. We should rather won- 
der at the intellectual energy expended in 
wrestling with a difficult and abstract subject. 
They entered, as we of the twentieth-century 
bourgeois do not, into the field of scholarship; 
they partook of disputes that were as interna- 
tional as Christendom; and shared with the 
chosen ones for whom all this education was 
made, Jonathan Edwards and his co-profes- 
sionals, an interest in problems far broader 

31 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

than their strip of Atlantic clearings. That 
the experience, whatever we may think of the 
value of the theology, was good for them does 
not, I think, permit of argument. There have 
never been abler Americans than at the end of 
the eighteenth century. 

But nineteenth-century America was a dif- 
ferent world. Interest in theology abated for 
reasons that need not here be discussed. More 
and more the United States diverged intellect- 
ually from our colonial unity with Europe ; our 
own problems engrossed us; and these were 
problems of material development, of local 
statecraft, of that elementary education which 
a democracy must necessarily take as its chief 
concern. What had been a professional train- 
ing by which God's ministers were to be se- 
lected became relatively unprofessional, a so- 
called ''liberal education," the object of which 
was to illumine and make pliable and broad the 
minds of laymen. The high purpose of the 
teacher was not now to choose the leaders of 

32 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

the spirit. It was rather to preserve in a new 
world of crude physical endeavor the arts and 
sciences that civilize the mind. 

American life in the nineteenth century had 
many of the characteristics that we are accus- 
tomed to associate with heroic barbarism. It 
had the same insecurity — insecurity of life on 
the border, insecurity of fortune where life was 
safe. It had the same frequency of hazardous 
toil against wild nature; the same accompani- 
ments of cold and privation ; the same vast and 
shadowy enterprises, usually collapsing; the 
same intensity of physical sensation; the same 
ardor of emotional experience in the spiritual 
realm. And always education mitigated ex- 
travagance, restrained excess, directed effort. 
Through education our ancestral Europe re- 
strained and guided us. Education kept us 
white. 

But never, perhaps, has the divergence be- 
tween life as it had to be lived and the civilities 
taught us in school been greater. Never has 

33 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

the ideal world, which, after all, it is the chief 
business of education to mirror, been more dif- 
ferent from the facts of experience than in 
America. The ridiculous scientist of Cooper's 
'Trairie" who mistakes his donkey for a new 
monster and thinks it more important to call 
the buffalo the bison than to eat when hungry 
of its hump, is a symbol of the contrast between 
what we learned and what we did in America. 
In the eighteenth century, education for most 
Americans was practical preparation for a 
knowledge of God's ways with man. In the 
nineteenth it had become not a preparation for 
life so much as an antiseptic against the de- 
moralizations of a purely material struggle to 
open up a continent. The results have been of 
grave political importance. 

For the divergence between theory and prac- 
tice explains the curiously traditional character 
of our schooling as we knew it in youth, as our 
grandfathers knew it in youth. I am not now 
speaking of the wearisome controversies over 

34 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

Latin and Greek and classic English literature, 
the so-called traditional subjects which make 
up a large part of education. It is not the let- 
ter, but the spirit, that makes the thing taught 
traditional. And ever since democracy began, 
the teacher has had to be the priest and guard- 
ian of tradition in America. He has been an 
anxious parent stretching the coverlet of racial 
culture over the restless limbs of little immi- 
grants. He has taught reading, writing, and 
arithmetic as a means of holding fast to our 
tradition. He has taught literature and his- 
tory and ''moral ethics" and ''natural science" 
as the containers of that tradition. We have 
almost forgotten that for a time in the early 
nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that 
the frontier would become Indian rather than 
European in its culture. We see clearly now 
how possible it would have been for whole 
regions of the South to relapse into negro semi- 
barbarism. We may guess that save for the 
teacher and his grinding in of tradition the 

35 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

white races of North America might have 
slipped backward, as too clearly have the white 
races in many parts of Latin America. 

One element in this education by tradition 
was specially important. Liberalism, the prin- 
ciple upon which this republic was founded, 
education took up as soon as it dropped 
theology, if not earlier. American education 
became impregnated with liberalism, made lib- 
eralism its chief tradition. What we study in 
school and college stays by us, overlaid perhaps, 
scarcely vital any more, yet packed close to the 
roots of our conscious being. And the com- 
post they gave us in America was liberalism. 
History enshrined the republican ideals of our 
founders and the democratic ideals of our nine- 
teenth-century development. Sometimes it 
was taught in college classes with ''sources'' 
duly ticketed. Sometimes it trickled through 
commencement speeches or primers thumbed 
on back-row benches. The results were the 
same. In literature, whether English or 

. 36 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

American, the same ideas were predominant, 
or at least were made to seem so by careful se- 
lection. Democracy and the rights of man 
blow through the reading of the American 
school-boy, somewhat aridly it must be admit- 
ted; but still they blow. Civics and govern- 
ment and the social sciences in these latter 
days, as they are taught in America, advance 
the same standard. 

Not less definite and persuasive was the in- 
fluence of the men who taught us. Many of 
them have been aristocratic in taste and in their 
misprision of the stupidities of the common 
man, but their text also was of liberalism and 
democracy whenever the subject or the occasion 
permitted. Even geography and spelling were 
presented as the means whereby the child of the 
laboring man had been given his chance to rise 
in the world and perhaps become President. 
Properly considered, the things we have been 
taught, the men who taught us, the very organ- 
ization of our school and college system, have 

37 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

been one vast engine for shaping the minds of 
young America in the turn and mold of Uberal- 
ism. 

But this Hberalism, like most of our educa- 
tion, was highly traditional. Our subjects and 
the men who taught them looked prevailingly 
backward for inspiration, recalled us to the 
past, warned us of the future. The urge was 
always the old Roman one — preserve the piety 
of your ancestors. Preparation for new con- 
ditions, for a possible new liberty in industry 
or politics, for a possible new democracy in 
wealth, there was, we must confess, very little. 
We were linked to tradition; we were made 
profoundly and sincerely liberal, at least in our 
theories of life ; we were implored to stand pat. 

And though education, as the art was prac- 
tised here in America, has perhaps kept us lib- 
eral, it has certainly given to liberalism that 
faint shadow of unreality, that sacrosanctity 
which belongs to all traditional beliefs. It is 
the traditional quality of American education 

38 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

that more than anv other single a^encv has 
petrified .\merican liberalism. 

\\'e plain Americans in our- little red school- 
houses and our big brick high schools and our 
spreading imiversities have learned republican- 
ism and the rights of man and the not-to-be- 
questioned opportunity of every person to go 
to the top of the ladder if he wished and were 
able. This we were taught explicitly and im- 
plicitly. And we believed these things because 
we were made to think that aH right-thinking 
men everywhere believed them: and therefore 
we recited Gladstone and Lincoln and Tous- 
saint L'Ouverture and passages from Carlyle's 
"French Revolution" and ^Irs, Bro\sTiing on 
the freeing of Italy with confident hearts. 
Furthermore, we felt that these principles were 
sincere, because, no matter how poor or how 
stupid, we found educational opportunities 
opened on ever}' side. There was no discrimi- 
nation in the quantity of American education, 
and but little in its qualit}-. Until we left the 

39 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

school or the campus, our liberal tradition fitted 
us like a garment. It never occurred to us 
that it might not always fit. 

Yet as soon as we moved out into America, 
crossing that bridge from theory to practice, 
from ideas to application, which in all countries 
is long and in new countries longest of all, 
strange contradiction began to be apparent. 
Republicanism, it appeared, worked out in 
practice, at least in our town, into boss control 
and domination by party leaders, acting usu- 
ally for vested interests. The rights of man, 
we discovered, had a curious sound when dis- 
cussed by labor-unions or the unemployed. 
Opportunities, it became clear, could not be 
freely oflfered to the man without capital unless 
we were prepared to change radically an in- 
dustrial system which our common sense taught 
us was better — at least for us — than the vision- 
ary industrial democracies that radicals with- 
out business experience wished to set up. 
Were these precious ideals of ours merely bun- 

40 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

combe, then, held only in theory, in practice to 
be disregarded? Or was democracy good as a 
half-way measure, but false as a general prin- 
ciple? Was our education a tradition to be 
reverenced — and disregarded ? 

Not a few reached the indicated conclusion, 
though they kept, as a rule, their opinions to 
themselves. Perhaps as many swung to the 
other extreme, believed that only more democ- 
racy would cure us, and also kept out of print, 
for fear of being associated with radical aliens 
who held much the same opinions in politics and 
social affairs, but very different conceptions of 
cleanliness, morals, and polite conversation. 
These were our right and left wings merely. 
The great mass of us, the everyday Americans, 
took things as they were with a kind of shrewd 
childish good sense, and pushed ahead, being 
as democratic as was convenient in this un- 
equal world, but taking no nonsense from 
people who would interfere with business in 
order to make us more so. And that is where 

41 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

we are now — at the end of the war, in the midst 
of a world revolution so great that no one 
knows whether it has just begun or is just end- 
ing. 

But a revolution drives men back upon their 
principles, makes them scan willingly or un- 
willingly the things they live by — the preju- 
dices, enlightenments, interpretations, convic- 
tions that in the largest sense are their educa- 
tion. And this is true not only of rapid revolu- 
tions, like the French and the Russian, but of 
slow ones, such as that revolution which has 
been slowly gathering headway in English- 
speaking countries for three decades or more, 
that revolution of social and industrial condi- 
tions now rapidly accelerating. And what 
have Americans thought of their education ? 

I think they have found it a brake, a stabil- 
izer, a deterrent alike from violent reaction and 
dangerous experiment. I think also that they 
have found it what it is — traditional. They 
have felt it as a taboo, good on Sundays, but on 

42 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

week-days not to be too closely regarded. 
Where it has preached restraint to the more 
radical, they have listened, but grown restless. 
Was it not John Bright who said that England 
would be ruined if the hours for labor should 
be shortened? Did not Cooper, who wrote the 
epic of frontier freedom, sharpen his pen to 
defend the unearned increment of the landlord ? 
Where it speaks of liberty and equality to the 
more conservative, they have listened, but not 
taken it too seriously. After all, the world 
must be governed and dividends paid. While 
the rights of the citizen should be safeguarded, 
business is business nevertheless, and politics 
politics. The Declaration of Independence, 
they felt, should be kept in its place, which was 
the Fourth of July. Theory — by which they 
meant education — has little place in practical 
affairs. They were liberals of course, but 
plain and prosperous Americans first of all, and 
the latter, at least, they intended to remain. 
And thus, in its noble attempt to shape the 

43 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

minds of Americans to a similitude of their 
full-blooded ancestors who dared to be radical, 
American education itself has acquired the 
sanctity, the reverence, the ghostliness of the 
dead. Like the dead, it is most influential 
upon spirits sensitive to the past, and operates 
through love and veneration and mere habit 
rather than through immediate compulsion. 
Like them, it visits the minds of the living only 
in glimpses of the moon, and its influence, 
though wide-spread, is partial and easily for- 
gotten in the noonday glare of active, practical 
life. Americans respect their education, but 
too seldom do they Hve by it. 

It is a good tradition, this American ideal of 
noble and sturdy liberalism. The only detrac- 
tion to be made is precisely that the education 
which embodies it is felt to be merely tradi- 
tional. But this is much the same as to say 
that last year's hat is a good hat, the only 
trouble being that when we wear it we invari- 
ably remember that it is last year's hat. And 

44 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA ' 

at least one unhappy consequence follows. 
American minds have been coddled in school 
and college for at least a generation. There 
are two kinds of mental coddling. The first 
belongs to the public schools, and is one of the 
defects of our educational system that we abuse 
privately and largely keep out of print. It is 
democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the 
failure to hold up standards, the willingness to 
let youth wobble upward, knowing little and 
that inaccurately, passing nothing well, grad- 
uating with an education that hits and misses 
like an old type-writer with a torn ribbon. 
America is full of ''sloppy thinking," of inac- 
curacy, of half-baked misinformation, of sen- 
timentalism, especially sentimentalism, as a re- 
sult of coddling by schools that cater to an 
easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per 
cent of a group of girls, graduates of the pub- 
lic schools, whose records I once examined, 
could do simple addition, only twenty-nine per 
cent simple multiplication correctly; a de- 

45 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

plorable percentage had a very inaccurate 
knowledge of elementary American geography. 

A dozen causes are responsible for this con- 
dition, and among them, I suspect, one, which 
if not major, at least deserves careful ponder- 
ing. The teacher and the taught have some- 
how drifted apart. His function in the large 
has been to teach an ideal, a tradition. He 
is content, he has to be content, with partial 
results. It is not for life as it is, it is for what 
life ought to be, that he is preparing even in 
arithmetic; he has allowed the faint unreality 
of a priestcraft to numb him. In the mind of 
the student a dim conception has entered, that 
this education — all education — is a garment 
merely, to be doffed for the struggle with real- 
ities. The will is dulled. Interest slackens. 

But it is in aristocratic coddling that the ef- 
fects of our educational attitude gleam out to 
the least observant understanding. This is the 
coddling of the preparatory schools and the col- 
leges, and it is more serious for it is a defect 

46 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

that cannot be explained away by the hundred 
difficulties that beset good teaching in a public- 
school system, nation-wide, and conducted for 
the young of every race in the American men- 
agerie. The teaching in the best American 
preparatory schools and colleges is as careful 
and as conscientious as any in the world. That 
one gladly asserts. Indeed, an American boy 
in a good boarding-school is handled like a 
rare microbe in a research laboratory. He is 
ticketed; every instant of his time is planned 
and scrutinized; he is dieted with brain food, 
predigested, and weighed before application. 
I sometimes wonder if a moron could not be 
made into an Abraham Lincoln by such a sys- 
tem — if the system were sound. 

It is not sound. The boys and girls, espe- 
cially the boys, are coddled for entrance exam- 
inations, coddled through freshman year, cod- 
dled oftentimes for graduation. And they too 
frequently go out into the world fireproof 
against anything but intellectual coddling. 

47 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

Such men and women can read only writing 
especially prepared for brains that will take 
only selected ideas, simply put. They can 
think only on simple lines, not too far extended. 
They can live happily only in a life where ideas 
never exceed the college sixty per cent of com- 
plexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic 
experience lies too far outside the range of 
their curriculum. A wofld where one reads 
the news and skips the editorials ; goes to musi- 
cal comedies, but omits the plays ; looks at illus- 
trated magazines, but seldom at books; talks 
business, sports, and politics, but never econom- 
ics, social welfare, and statesmanship — that is 
the world for which we coddle the best of our 
youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by 
their own innate originality; more bear the 
marks to the grave. 

The process is simple, and one can see it in 
the English public schools (where it is being at- 
tacked vivaciously) quite as commonly as here. 
You take your boy out of his family and his 

48 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

world. You isolate him except for companion- 
ship with other nursery transplantings and 
teachers themselves isolated. And then you 
feed him, nay, you cram him, with good tradi- 
tional education, filling up the odd hours with 
the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. 
Then you subject him to a special cramming 
and send him to college, where sometimes he 
breaks through the net of convention woven 
about him, and sees the real world as it should 
appear to the student before he becomes part 
of it ; but more frequently wraps himself deep 
and more deeply in conventional opinion, con- 
ventional practice, until, the limbs of his intel- 
lect bound tightly, he stumbles into the outer 
world. 

And there, in the swirl and the vivid practi- 
calities of American life, is the net loosened? 
I think not. I think rather that the youth 
learns to swim clumsily despite his encum- 
brances of lethargic thinking and tangled ideal- 
ism. But if they are cut? If he goes on the 

49 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

sharp rocks of experience, finds that hardness, 
shrewdness, selfish individualism pay best in 
American life, what has he in his spirit to meet 
this disillusion? Of what use has been his 
education in the liberal, idealistic traditions of 
America? Of some use, undoubtedly, for 
habit, even a dull habit, is strong; but whether 
useful enough, whether powerful enough, to 
save America, to keep us 'Svhite'' in the newer 
and more colloquial sense, the future will test 
and test quickly. 

Why do we coddle our aristocracy, who can 
pay for the best and most efifective education? 
I think that the explanation again is to be 
sought in the traditionalism of American edu- 
cation. If our chief, our ultimate, duty to the 
boy that we teach is to make him an ''American 
gentleman," and if by this is meant that we are 
to instil the essence of the Americanism which 
made Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt, 
and let it go at that, and if all our education 
hovers about this central purpose — ^^why, the 

50 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

stage is set for a problem play that may become 
tragedy or farce. It is not thinking we teach 
then so much as what has been taught. It is 
not life, but what has been lived ; not American 
liberalism, but a conservatism that never has 
been characteristically American. The tradi- 
tion is not at fault, nor the thought of the past, 
nor the lives of our ancestors; it is when all 
these things are taught as dead idealism unre- 
lated to the facts of the present that they be- 
come merely traditional. 

And the boy and girl are not deceived. 
They take all that is given them — no youth in 
the world are so pliable, so receptive as ours — 
and retain and respect and cherish what they 
remember of it. But it is clear that for them 
it is tradition, it is unreal in comparison with 
their sports, their social aspirations. It will 
be unreal in comparison with their business and 
their politics and their household affairs. It 
will be a venerated tradition of liberal think- 
ing for them of which they will be highly con- 
Si 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

servative. But it will not function in their 
lives — not more at least than the sixty per cent 
that they sought for in order to get that degree 
of bachelor of arts which certified that they 
were versed in the thought of their forefathers. 
And so they merge in the common American 
mind that I have called conservative-liberal. 

I know of no better proof of the truth of 
what I have just written than the history of 
our college undergraduates in war-time. 

Here is such a demonstration as comes only 
once in a generation. Of all unpreparedness, 
the unpreparedness of the undergraduate for 
war was apparently chief. He knew little 
about the war, its causes, its manifestations, 
for he is not an ardent reader of current events 
outside his college world, nor does he hear 
much of the talk of the market-place. He 
knew little about war. The R. O. T. C. had 
spread some ideas of drill and discipline and 
the technic of fighting; but he was neither 
drilled nor disciplined in 1917. And as for 

52 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

the training in accurate obedience and in exact 
thinking which war is supposed to demand, he 
simply did not have it, or so we thought. Nor 
had his particularistic fashion of following his 
own little contests to the exclusion of loyalties 
to the world outside, and his indifference to 
politics beyond fraternity elections, or econom- 
ics beyond the cost of theater-tickets and beer, 
led us to assume a ready response to a great 
moral emergency in national affairs. 

We were utterly deceived. The response of 
the American undergraduate was immediate 
and magnificent. He crowded into the most 
dangerous military professions, and was emi- 
nent in the most difficult branches of organiza- 
tion and experiment. He did not, it is true, 
think very broadly about the war, but he 
thought intensely. He did not learn accuracy, 
steadiness, independence overnight, but he 
learned them. He was wholly admirable. 
And the women, who in ways not yet suffi- 
ciently celebrated made it possible for the 

S3 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

country to stiffen to the crisis, were as eager to 
serve as the men. 

And the reason, I believe, was that for the 
time the education of the undergraduate ceased 
being traditional and became a moving force in 
his experience. The dim liberal idealism in 
which his mind had been moving for many 
years suddenly took on color and became fire. 
Every impulse of his mental training urged 
him to do just what was asked of him, to 
struggle for democracy, for justice, for a 
square deal ; to believe in the rights of man and 
the permanence of right and the supremacy of 
a righteous idealism. And his habits of hard, 
earnest play, where rules were obeyed and vic- 
tory went to the best player, also were the very 
stuff the world wanted, also transformed mi- 
raculously into the very apparatus of war. 
His traditional education, with its extra-cur- 
riculum of games that also were traditional in 
their neglect of the new and special qualities 
required for success in modern life, precisely 

54 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

fitted the clamorous need of the hour. And the 
undergraduate for a Httle while silenced his 
critics, amazed his friends, and was in many 
respects happier than in those years of peace 
when he was trying to bridge the gap between 
his education and life as it was being lived in 
America. 

And with peace he relapses — the American 
in general relapses into the old discontinuity. 
The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once 
more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. 
As long as the patriotism lit by the war and 
danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism 
bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. 
For peace means that we drop our ardors and 
face again the insistent reachings of the democ- 
racy for a greater share in wealth, for a greater 
control over productivity, for representation in 
industry as well as in politics. Peace means 
that we must face not war, with its romantic 
thrills and its common enemy, but the prosaic 
causes of war that hide among friends as well 

55 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, 
self-denial, and humbleness of spirit, a struggle 
in which the Croix de Guerre is likely to be re- 
proach and contumely. 

The break between our education and the life 
we are living again widens, and it is this break 
which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed 
alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily 
defensible ; the hustling vigor of our life is also 
defensible. The trouble is that in ordinary 
times they fail somehow or another to connect. 
Education grows bloodless. Life becomes 
aimless or merely self-regarding. What we 
believe grows pallid and fades before it trans- 
mutes into what we do. Indeed, I would go 
further and say that Americans, and especially 
the graduates of universities, are somewhat 
weakened by their education. They go out 
into life with an enormous appetite for living 
and a set of ideals like a row of preserved 
vegetables canned and hermetically sealed for 
future contingencies. In 1917 and 1918 we 

S6 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

opened some of those jars and found the con- 
tents good for a special emergency. But ordi- 
narily the lids are tight, while we go about our 
business proud of our stores of education, but 
inwardly uncertain, like the housewife, as to 
whether or not those ideas that seemed so good 
when our teachers packed them away in the 
season of youth will not be sour to the taste of 
practical modernity. 

The clamor for vocational education is a pro- 
test against this ineffectiveness of the merely 
traditional. But the cure does not lie in such 
a medicining. Vocational education is well 
enough, and we need more of it, but training of 
the hands and of the brain to purely material 
accomplishments will never save liberalism in 
America. The strength of vocational educa- 
tion is that it looks forward and prepares for 
things as they are. Its weakness, when ad- 
ministered alone, is that it neglects the direct- 
ing mind. In any large sense it is aimless, or, 
rather, it aims at successful slavery quite as 

57 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

much as at successful freedom. Liberal edu- 
cation also must look forward, must put its tra- 
ditions to work, must germinate, and become 
alive in the mind of the American, and then 
teach him by old principles to attack new prob- 
lems. 

We must either live by our education or live 
without it. The alternatives are desiccation 
and anarchy. If we live by it, education itself 
stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, 
adapts itself like an organism to environment. 
If we live without and beyond and in neglect of 
education, as many "practical" Americans have 
always done once they left school or college, 
education decays, and sooner or later the man 
decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration 
of busyness, which is the modern equivalent of 
barbarism. 

Once before, and far more seriously, a civili- 
zation was threatened because its education be- 
came merely traditional and ceased to function 

58 



CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 

in practical life. The society of Appolinaris 
Sidonius in the fifth century, as Dill describes 
it, was faced with economic disruption, with 
hordes of aliens, with a rampant individualism 
that put the acquisition of a secure fortune 
above everything else. The leaders failed to 
lead. 'Their academic training only deepened 
and intensified the deadening conservatism of 
unassailable wealth." 'Taith in Rome had 
killed all faith in a wider future for humanity 
....'' There was an ^'apparent inability to 
imagine, even in the presence of tremendous 
forces of disruption, that society should ever 
cease to move along the ancient lines." Roman 
imperialism divorced itself from Roman 
thought and became a deadening tyranny. 
Roman thought divorced itself from Roman 
life and became an empty philosophy. And 
the sixth century and disaster followed. 

The historical analogy is imperfect. Our 
civilization is still vigorous where the Roman 

59 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

was tired and weak. No outer barbarians 
threaten us. Science safeguards us from 
economic breakdown. 

And yet, like the skeptic who does not believe 
in God, but refuses to take chances on his 
death-bed, I should not scoff at the parallel. 
Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism 
become an article of faith not an instrument of 
practice — all these are potential of decay, of ex- 
plosion. We must look to our education. If 
it does not grip our life, we must change edu- 
cation. If life is not gripped, our life needs 
reforming. And the thing is so extraordi- 
narily difficult that it is high time we ceased 
praising for a while the virtues of our fore- 
fathers or the wealth of our compatriots, and 
began the task. After all, it means no more 
than to teach the next generation not merely to 
preserve, but also to carry on, the traditions of 
America. 



60 



CHAPTER III 

RADICAL AMERICA 

IT is with no intention to be paradoxical that 
I call America a radical nation. I know 
well by experience, sometimes galling, what 
an English labor leader or a French socialist 
thinks of America, as he understands it. A 
mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground 
of the bourgeoisie, the birthplace of trusts, 
where even the labor-unions are capitalistic. 
If the world is to be saved for democracy, he 
says, it will not be by America. 

I am not so sure. Being one of those who 
doubted whether the successful termination of 
the war would forever make safe democratic 
ideals, I feel at liberty to doubt whether the 
triumph of a European proletariate will give us 

6i 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

what we want. It depends much upon what 
one means by democracy. And correspond- 
ingly, whether America is fundamentally radi- 
cal or conservative depends much upon what 
one means by radicalism. If, like Louis XIV 
or Napoleon, I had a leash of writers and 
scholars at my command, I would have them 
produce nothing but definitions while these 
critical years of transition lasted. I would 
make them into an academy whose fiat in gen- 
eral definition would be as valid as the French 
Academy's in the meaning of a word. I would 
make it a legal offense for two men to quarrel 
over socialism when one means communism 
and the other state control of the post-office. I 
would, like the early Quakers, require arbitra- 
tion for all disputants, especially in politics, 
knowing that a clear head would quickly dis- 
cover that arguers on democracy conceivably 
meant anything from a standard collar for 
every one to nationalization of women. But 
the good old days of literary dictatorship are 

62 



RADICAL AMERICA 

past. The most a writer upon the mind of the 
everyday American can do is to endeavor hon- 
estly to make his own definitions as he goes; 
and I believe that American radicalism needs a 
good deal of defining. 

It is not the doctrines of Babeuf or Marx or 
Lenine that have made what seems to be the 
indigenous variety of American radicalism. 
Their beliefs, and especially those of Marx, 
have found acceptance here. There are mo- 
ments in intellectual or industrial development 
when men's minds become seeding-grounds for 
ideas blown from without. There were cent- 
uries when the mystical ideas of the Christian 
East were sown and rooted in the barbarian 
brains of the West. There were the years 
when the liberal ideas of the French Revolution 
were blown across Italy, Germany, and the 
Low Countries. And much that we call radical 
in America is simply foreign seed, growing 
vigorously in our soil, but not yet acclimated, 
as it is growing also in Russia and New Zea- 

63 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

land. And much is not American in any sense, 
but rather the purely alien ideas of immigrants 
— individual men among us. It is not for 
nothing that Trotzky was here, and the Marx- 
ists, the syndicalists, the nihilists, and the com- 
munists of half Europe. We have been ex- 
posed to every germ of radicalism ever hatched 
in the Old World; yet neither the young pro- 
fessor, lecturing on the redistribution of 
wealth, nor the Russian stevedore, who in 
lower New York awaits the proletariate revo- 
lution, truly represents American radicalism. 
These are the ideas and these the men our rest- 
less youth are borrowing from, but they are not 
yet, they may never be, American. 

It is fortunately not yet difficult to separate 
foreign from indigenous radicalism. There is 
that in both our heredity and our environment 
which makes the American mind bad soil for 
the seed of foreign ideologies. They rain upon 
us, they germinate; but they do not make a 
crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; 

64 



RADICAL AMERICA 

our New World has kept us too cheerfully 
busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned 
too low over this blessed America for discon- 
tent which leads to dreaming, oppression which 
makes revolt, to be common among us. We 
''old Americans," at least of this generation, 
are poor material for Bolshevism; even as 
socialists we are never more than half con- 
vinced. Our radicalism has been of a different 
breed. 

Indeed, radicalism, like religion and sea- 
water, takes color from the atmosphere in 
which it is found. The French radical pos- 
sesses the lucidity and the self-regarding spirit 
of the modern French mind. He lends ideas, 
but does not propagate them. The English 
radical seeks his ends by direct political action 
in good English fashion. And the native 
American has his own way also. That its 
essential quality of radicalism has often been 
overlooked, while the term has been bandied 
among soapbox orators and devotees of the 

65 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

bomb, is natural, but unfortunate for clear 
thinking. 

Our home-bred radicalism has been physical 
and moral, not intellectual. It has been a 
genuine attempt to tear down and rebuild, but 
it has not ordinarily been called radicalism, 
which term has been usually applied to radi- 
cal thinking, to the intellectual radicalism of 
revolutionary organizations and protestants 
against the social order. Our effective rad- 
icals have been the leaders, not the oppo- 
nents, of American society. They have been 
business men, philanthropists, educators, not 
strike-leaders, social workers, and philoso- 
phers. 

I talked recently to the head of a great manu- 
facturing plant where technical skill both of 
hand and of brain was exercised upon wood 
and brass and steel. The modern world, ac- 
cording to his viewing (which was very ob- 
viously from the angle of business) is divided 
into two categories, executives and engineers. 

66 



RADICAL AMERICA 

Executives are the men who organize and con- 
trol. They are the ones chiefly rewarded. 
Engineers invent and carry out. They are the 
experts. It is the executives who lead ; the ex- 
perts supply ideas, work out methods, but fol- 
low. 

This statement may be disputable, and it is 
certainly a painfully narrow bed in which to 
tuck American life and American ideals. 
Nevertheless, it has at least one element of pro- 
found truth. In the world of physical en- 
deavor and physical organization it is executive 
business men who have changed, broken up, re- 
organized, developed the material world of 
America. They have fearlessly scrapped the 
whole machinery of production, transporta- 
tion, and trade as it existed in the last genera- 
tion, and in many respects improved upon, or 
destroyed by competition, the parallel order in 
the Old World. They have been true radicals 
of the physical category, and their achieve- 
ments have been as truly radicalism as the ex- 

^7 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

periments of Lenine in government ownership. 
That it is a physical radicahsm, dealing with 
material values chiefly and without reference 
to some of the greatest needs of the human 
spirit, does not mean that intellect of a high, if 
not the highest, order may not have been re- 
quired for its successful accomplishment. 

Our other native radicals, the philanthropists 
and the educators, have also been chiefly execu- 
tives. Their work has been inspired by the 
stored-up moral force of America, especially 
puritan America. But their great achieve- 
ments, like those of the business men, have been 
in organization and development rather than in 
thought. 

In earlier generations our moral radicals 
were such men as Emerson and Whitman. 
To-day they are college presidents, organizers 
of junior high-school systems, or heads of 
the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations — 
prime movers all of them in systems of edu- 
cational or philanthropic practice that uplift 

68 



RADICAL AMERICA 

millions at a turn of a jack-screw. And these 
men in any true sense of the word are radi- 
cals — so radical in their thoroughgoing at- 
tempts to transform society by making it more 
intelligent, healthier, more productive that all 
Europe is protesting or imitating them. Who 
is exercising a greater pressure for durable 
change upon the largest number, who is dig- 
ging most strenuously about the roots of the old 
order, John Rockefeller, Jr. and his co-workers 
or Trotzky? It is not easy to say. 

This essay is not propaganda, and I am not 
particularly concerned as to whether or no the 
reader accepts my broadening of the term 
^'radicalism.'' Time may force him to do so, 
for no one can tell in a given age just what 
actions and what theories will lead to the tear- 
ing up of old institutions and the planting of a 
new order. Those absolutist kings, Philip 
Augustus and his successors, who crushed to- 
gether the provinces of France, were, we see 
now, radicals, though power and privilege were 

69 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

their motives. I, however, am interested in 
men rather than in categories, and the philan- 
thropist radicals, the business radicals, and the 
educational pioneers of America already in- 
terest the world strangely. 

What they are in essence is of course more 
important than the name we give them. And 
first of all I believe that in a genuine, if nar- 
row, sense they have been idealistic; indeed, 
that their American idealism has made them 
radical. If America at present is actively, 
practically idealistic (something Europe and 
the world in general would like to have de- 
termined) it is due to them. 

Idealism is not a negative virtue. It is not 
mysticism. It is not meditation, though it may 
be its fruit. Whatever idealism may be in 
philosophical definition, in life it is the desire 
and the attempt to put into practice conceptions 
of what ought theoretically to be accomplished 
in this imperfect world; and the quality of the 

70 



RADICAL AMERICA 

idealism depends upon the quality of the ideal- 
ist. 

In this sense — a true sense for America, 
however inapplicable to the Middle Ages — who 
can doubt that such Americans as I have de- 
scribed are idealistic? Nowhere in the world 
are there more visible evidences of the desires 
of men wreaking themselves upon earth and 
stone and metal, upon customs and government 
and morals, than in this new continent. And 
these desires are predominantly for betterment, 
for perfection — a low perfection sometimes, it 
is true — for the ''uplift," physically, morally, 
intellectually of humanity. 

Of course the quality of American idealism 
is mixed. Beside the pure ambition of a St. 
Francis to make men brothers, beside the aspir- 
ing hope of the cathedral builders to make faith 
lovely to the eye, the ideal of a chain of five- 
and-ten cent stores, or a railroad system, or 
even a democratic method of education, is not 

71 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

a luminous, not a spiritual, idealism. But a 
working ideal for the benefit of the raQ^ it may 
be, and often is. 

The truth of this has not seemed obvious to 
Europeans or to most Americans. Our in- 
dividualism has been so intense and often so 
self-seeking, our preoccupation since the Civil 
War so dominantly with matter rather than 
with mind or spirit, that it is easy for foreign- 
ers to call us mere money-grubbers. Yet no 
one who has ever talked with a "captain of in- 
dustry" or the director of a great philanthropic 
enterprise feels doubt as to the unsoundness of 
this description. Unfair, narrow, material- 
minded we may have been, but our enterprises 
have had vision behind them, dreams, perhaps, 
imposed upon us by the circumstances of a new, 
raw, continent, by wealth for the seeking, by 
opportunities for the making, by vast battles 
with nature to be organized and won. 

Furthermore, behind and beneath all our 
striving, sets of moral ideas have been active. 

72 



RADICAL AMERICA 

America has never been blase or cynical. We 
have never relinquished the ethics of puritan- 
ism, which are the ethics of the Bible. Even 
the greedy capitalist has disgorged at last, and 
devoted his winnings to the improvement of the 
society he preyed upon. But most American 
capitalists have not been greedy. They them- 
selves have been devoured by a consuming de- 
sire to accomplish, to build up, to put through. 
When they have broken laws, it is because the 
laws have held them back from what seemed to 
them necessary, inevitable development for the 
greater good of all — because, in a word, they 
were radical. 

One night in war-time, at a base port in Scot- 
land far from our own environment and our 
native prejudices, I heard the self-told tale of 
an arch-enemy of American "interests," a 
pugnacious man who had fought and won, with 
a price on his head, sent millionaires to jail, 
been calumniated, been trapped by infamous 
conspiracies, and escaped them — a man better 

73 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

hated, better loved than is the fortune of most 
of us. My other companion was another 
American, a young, but celebrated, preacher, a 
moralist of the breed of the Beechers and the 
Spurgeons. And the same question rose to our 
lips when the story was finished. These ene- 
mies, these magnates who had been jailed and 
defeated, and yet still fought and often success- 
fully, were they mere self-seekers, rascals, by 
any fair definition? And neither of us was 
satisfied with that answer, nor was the hero of 
the story. Two of us at least agreed that it 
was rather a case of ''enterprise" versus ''social 
justice,'' of individualistic effort versus the 
rights of a community. The zeal of the cap- 
italists had burned in their hearts until they 
broke through morality in an efifort to make 
good. 

But of course most of our American radicals 
have not been even illegal in their idealism. 
Their zeal has encountered only obstinacy, stu- 
pidity, and the intractable conservatism of ordi- 

74 



RADICAL AMERICA 

nary life. These men have built up great in- 
dustries that made life more facile, or extended 
great educational and health enterprises over 
States and beyond seas, with little harm to any 
man and much good to most, unless the source 
of the wealth expended be questioned, or the 
effect of a zealot's ideas enforced upon mil- 
lions. 

Indeed, if strength of purpose, if energy, if 
a burning desire to change, to better the minds, 
the bodies, or the tools of men, were all that 
could be asked of radicalism, then we might 
well rest content with the achievements of the 
American idealist-radical. But more has been 
asked of the reformer, even of the reformer of 
business methods, than energy and will. The 
radicalism I have described, based upon com- 
mon sense and inspired by restless virility, has 
not always been adequate. The pioneering 
days are ended when a good shot could always 
get game, a strong arm always find plowlands. 
It is time to take thought. And if one com- 

75 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

pares the uprooting energy of Americans with 
the intellectual radicalism of Europe or with 
the new radicalism of the incoming American 
generation, a curious difference appears. Our 
old radicalism was perhaps healthier, certainly 
more productive of immediate betterment to 
those who profited by it ; but it is harder to de- 
fine, harder to follow into a probable future, be- 
cause, when all is said, it is relatively aimless. 
Where do our vast business enterprises lead? 
Toward a greater production of this world's 
goods, toward an accumulation of wealth in the 
hands of the sturdy organizers; but equally 
toward a vast corporate machine in which the 
individual man becomes a particle lost in the 
mass, toward a society which produces wealth 
without learning to distribute or employ it for 
the purposes of civilization. I do not say that 
this latter port is our destination. I say that 
our business leaders are steering a course 
which is just as likely to land us there as any- 

76 



RADICAL AMERICA 

where. Or, rather, they are stoking the en- 
gines and letting the rudder go free. 

And is our vast educational enterprise any 
more definitely aimed? Perhaps so, for the 
increase of intelligence is an end in itself. 
Nevertheless, for what, let us say, is the Amer- 
ican high school preparing, a new social order, 
or the stabilization of the old one? When the 
aristocrats and the burghers of Europe began 
to be educated, they tore themselves apart in 
furious wars over religion. When the West- 
ern proletariate becomes educated, will it not 
tear our social fabric in class wars also? Are 
we educating for this or against it ? For what 
kind of society are we educating? The social- 
ist has his answer. Can American school 
boards say? 

And our organized philanthropists, combat- 
ing hookworm, tuberculosis, lynching, child la- 
bor, liquor, slums, and preventable crime? 
The medieval church, hampered by its lack of 

77 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

science and the waywardness of its world, en- 
gaged in such a struggle, and from a thousand 
monasteries, built, like our modern founda- 
tions, upon the profits of exploitation, strove to 
uplift Europe. Its aim and end were clear : to 
practise charity that the souls of workers and 
donors might be saved ; to clothe the naked and 
feed the hungry that love might be felt to 
govern the world. And the church succeeded 
in its measure until, on the somewhat specious 
plea that not love, but justice, was demanded, 
rapacious governments seized the capital of the 
ecclesiastical corporations and sold the abbeys 
for building stone and lead. 

Our great organizations are more efficient 
than the church, because they are more scien- 
tific. Whether they are more successful de- 
pends upon one's estimate of success. The 
modern man, for whom they care, is a cleaner, 
brighter, more long-lived person than his 
medieval ancestor. He is probably better ma- 
terial for civilization, because, if more vulgar- 

78 



RADICAL AMERICA 

ized, he is more intelligent. That he is happier 
is not so certain. The church inspired a con- 
fidence (not always justified) in the friendli- 
ness of destiny which the Rockefeller Founda- 
tion has so far failed to equal. Nevertheless, 
scientific philanthropy, though it promises less, 
achieves what it does promise more thoroughly 
and without those terrible by-products of the 
ecclesiastical system — servility, pauperism, 
bigotry, and superstition. But what is its aim ? 
With little more regard to the source of their 
wealth than the church, the philanthropies of 
to-day have far less regard for the final results 
of their benefactions. As with the educators, 
it is enough for them, so to speak, to improve 
the breed. The apparent philosophy behind 
their program is that when the proletariate is 
bathed, educated, and made healthy, it will be 
civilized, and therefore competent to take over 
the world (including universities and steel 
mills, railroads and hospitals) and run it. But 
the executives of these great organizations 

79 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

would probably protest against this reading of 
their expectations almost as quickly as the 
donors of the funds; certainly they show no 
readiness to meet the proletariate half-way on 
its upward path. Clearly, you cannot wash, 
teach, and invigorate society without power- 
fully affecting the whole social fabric. The 
feeble experiments of the nineteenth century in 
universal education have already proved that. 
Some transformation the great endowments of 
our age are laboring to bring about. For the 
creating of a new race they have a plan, but 
not for its salvation, even on this side of 
heaven. Indeed, as the German experience 
shows, they may even become instruments by 
which the common man is made a mere tool 
firmly grasped by the hand of authority. Com- 
mon sense alone governs them. Their vision 
is bent upon the immediate, not the ultimate, 
future. 

A little vague these criticisms may seem to 
the practical mind; and vague, when philo- 

80 



RADICAL AMERICA 

sophically considered, are the aims of Ameri- 
can radicalism. Very different, indeed, they 
are from the clean-cut programs of the 
European radical. There is little vagueness in 
socialism, little vagueness in syndicalism, the 
very opposite of vagueness, despite the efforts 
of the American press, in Bolshevism. In all 
these systems the past is condemned, the 
present reconstructed, and the future made 
visible with a lucidity that betrays their origin 
in efforts of the pure reason. That, of course, 
is the difficulty — at least to American and most 
British intelligences. The aim of Bolshevism 
is so definite as to be almost mathematical. 
Society as a whole is considered economically, 
and a program deduced that will fill the most 
mouths with the least labor. To be sure, 
stomach-filling is not the sole purpose of Lenine 
and his followers. They argue, and with more 
right than our easy-going bourgeois civilization 
is willing to concede, that idleness, unrest, and 
crime are more often the result than the cause 

8i 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

of poverty. Nevertheless, the type radical of 
the European variety does unquestionably rest 
his case upon the premise that man is merely a 
tool-using animal. Ask a Bolshevik where 
civilization is going, and he will answer you 
with ease and explicitness. Ask the average 
American, and he will either reply in vague 
platitudes or deny both knowledge and respon- 
sibility. Of the two men he is less likely to be 
wrong. 

And note well that our domesticated social- 
ists and intelligentzia, though far more in- 
clined to consider the human factor than the 
Bolsheviki, have the same advantage of clarity 
of aim, and the same tendency to confuse ideas 
with facts. Common sense — not the highest 
virtue, not the virtue which will save our souls, 
or even our bodies, in a crisis like war or a 
turmoil of the spirit — is often lacking in the 
socialist. Good humor — again not a quality 
that wins heaven's gates, but a saving grace, 
nevertheless — is noticeably absent from the 

82 



RADICAL AMERICA 

columns of our radical weeklies. An admir- 
able service they are rendering in clarifying the 
American mind, in forcing it, or some of it, to 
face issues, to think things through, to be in- 
telligent as well as sensible; but the logical 
rigidity of their program inhibits that sense of 
proportion which recognizes the Falstaffs and 
the Micawbers of this world, smiles sometimes 
over miscarriages of idealism, sympathizes 
with feeble, humorous man, does not always 
scold. 

And yet the American who dislikes scolding 
should beware of superciliousness. It is much 
easier for genial folks to chide the critics with 
programs than to be critical of themselves. 
The normal American is a product of Ameri- 
can education, with its insistence upon liberal 
progress, upon acceleration toward the vaguest 
of goals. It has not taught him to be critical 
of others in any thorough-going fashion, it has 
not taught him to be critical of himself. The 
confidence that has carried our business to a 

83 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

maximum, that has flung our schools broadcast, 
and swept our philanthropies over the world, 
spelled differently is self-assurance. Nothing 
disturbs us so much as to be told to stop and 
think. Nothing angers the business world so 
much as legislation that ''halts business." 
Nothing infuriates an educational organizer 
more than to question the quality, not the 
quantity, of his product. We have seen clearly 
what we wished to do with iron and coal and 
food. We have felt, in education and philan- 
thropy, sure of our moral bases. Our energy 
has been concentrated on going ahead. To be 
radical intellectually, to think it all out in terms 
of a possible relation of labor and capital, of 
a possible education, of a possible society for 
the future — that has not appealed to us. We 
have shunned philosophical programs by in- 
stinct, and wilfully built for to-day instead of 
tomorrow. The American radical has done 
too little thinking; the European, perhaps too 
much. 

84 



RADICAL AMERICA 

But the infection of thought is spreading. I 
do not believe that the youths who will make 
the coming generation — the youths that fought 
the war — are going to be radicals in the sense 
that I have called European. If the ideas of 
Marx and Lenine ever take root in America, it 
will be because social injustice such as we have 
not yet been cursed with makes a soil for them. 
If they take root, they transform in the grow- 
ing, like foreign plants in California weather. 
But the new generation is not like the old. It 
is more sensitive to the winds of doctrine. It 
is less empirical, less optimistic, less self-as- 
sured. 

Already one can divide into two classes the 
undergraduates as one finds them in American 
colleges. The smaller group their elders would 
call radical. But they are not socialists, not 
anarchists, not even consistently liberal. More 
truly, they are critics of things as they are. 
Their minds are restless ; they are ever seeking 
for definitions, for solutions, for a cause to en- 

85 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

roll under. They are restless under the push 
of common sense America that drives them into 
activity without explanation. They are pain- 
fully aware of the difference between their 
ideas and the conditions of life in modern so- 
ciety, and are determined to test one by the 
other. Their native idealism has become in- 
tellectual. 

The other group is far larger, but, if less 
restless, is no more static. Most of its mem- 
bers are indifferent to the new ideas scintillat- 
ing all over the world, if indeed they are not 
ignorant of them. Nevertheless, their faith in 
society as it was is curiously weak. If few of 
them are likely to become socialists, few also 
will be inspired by the physical and moral ideal- 
ism of their fathers. The na'ive enthusiasm of 
those fathers for "movements,'' ''ideals," ''pro- 
gress" is not (utiless I miss my guess) common 
among them. They are not likely to overturn 
America a second time in order to make great 
fortunes ; philanthropy does not interest them ; 

86 



RADICAL AMERICA 

education as a missionary endeavor does not 
seem to attract them. Their moral founda- 
tions are less solid than in old days ; their ener- 
gies less boundless; aimless endeavor for the 
sake of doing something is no longer a lure. 
Either they will find a program of their own to 
excite them, or stand pat upon the fortune they 
expect to inherit. If their future is to be nar- 
rowed to a choice between pleasure and mere 
productivity, why, then these men would rather 
run motor-cars than make them. There is a 
very real danger that rather than hustle for the 
sake of hustling, they will prefer to ''lie down" 
on their job. And thanks to the homogeneity 
of the current American mind, this analysis, if 
it is true at all, is true of thousands. 

The American radical in the future, I take it, 
will still be idealist, but not Bolshevik. That 
generalization from the needs of poverty is at 
the same time too material to suit his temper, 
which is still fundamentally moral, and too rash 
economically to sit with his practical common 

87 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

sense. He will remain an idealist; but a 
sharpening of his intellect will give teeth to his 
idealism, and the practical common sense he 
will carry over from the days when his kind 
were pioneers in a new world will steady him. 
What he will want is not yet clear, except that 
it will certainly not be the world of Marx or 
the kaiser (himself in many respects a radical). 
What he will do I cannot venture to guess. 
But if one dare not prophesy, one may at least 
hope. 

And my hope is that a principle now visibly 
at work among many Americans may guide 
him also. Principles, if they are sound, have 
a way of making themselves felt through the 
padding of mental habit and convention, like 
knobs in a chair-seat. 

The principle I have in mind is merely this : 
that a man's character and the ideas upon 
which, so to speak, he operates must be ap- 
praised separately. Tenacity of will, honesty 
of spirit, tenderness of heart — such elements 

88 



RADICAL AMERICA 

of character make a man neither conservative 
nor radical, but they cannot be left out of polit- 
ical accounting. 

And my hope is that the new generation is 
going to be forced toward such a weighing and 
discrimination of character and policies. 
Their mental padding has worn thin in war- 
time. The moral conventions that we have ac- 
cepted almost unhesitatingly here in America 
no longer protect the youth with certainty from 
the shrewd blows of rationalism or superstition. 

Therefore ideas and character are both likely 
to be more closely inspected in the days that are 
coming. The conservative minded, as in the 
past, will emphasize character ; and as that is a 
much better platform to stand on than mere ob- 
stinacy or self-interest, they will presumably be 
better conservatives, provided that the intel- 
lectual unrest of the times forces them to think. 
The radicals will search for ideas that may 
transform the future, and if the abundance of 
ideas in relation to the paucity of accomplish- 

89 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

ment causes them to put a higher value upon 
character, why, so much for the better radical- 
ism. 

No future in the history of the world has 
been so interesting as is the immediate future 
of America. Our next great political leader, 
who may be conservative, but is probably radi- 
cal, is now in college or has but lately been 
graduated — unless, indeed, he has just been ad- 
mitted to a labor-union. And he is studying, 
one hopes, the men who dealt most heavily 
in character, the amiable McKinley, the fiercely 
instinctive Roosevelt ; he is studying the careers 
of the men who have been dominated chiefly by 
ideas, the moral idealist Wilson, the ruthless 
thinker Lenine. He is learning, one hopes, 
when and why each and all failed, each and all 
in their measure succeeded. Whether he 
profits, and we profit, from their experience, 
time alone will discover. 



90 



CHAPTER IV 

AMERICAN IDEALISM 

IS American idealism a virtue, a disease, or 
an illusion? The question cannot be 
answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry 
with which Tennyson threatened the flower in 
the crannied wall — what man is, and what God 
is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can 
be made ready for answering. The writer, 
and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer to 
it ; and that is better than the inner feeling of 
many an American just now, who, weary of 
five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly be- 
lieves that American idealism is first of all a 
nuisance. 

Yet it was never so easy to make a case for 
the virtue of idealism as in retrospect of the 

91 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

years 1914-18. What many have never 
grasped in the confusion of the times is that 
exactly the same ideaHstic prime motive made 
us join hearts from the first with Great Britain 
and France, kept us out of war for two years 
and a half, and brought us in on that April of 
191 7. There is always a complex of motives 
behind every war, but there is also, with few 
exceptions, a primum mobile, and with us it was 
the distrust, the fear, the hatred that were the 
reactions of our idealism against arbitrary vio- 
lence. The invasion of Belgium settled our 
will for Belgium and her allies. Our distrust 
of war, especially European war, as a means by 
which we could bring about justice and peace, 
kept us out of the struggle despite clamorous, 
and perhaps far-sighted, minorities. Our final 
conviction that violence was a fire loose in the 
world, which must be stamped out, drove us 
from easy neutrality into war. And if in the 
last of these three stages dread of the future 
and the need of immediate self-defense had 

92 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

their large part, they did iTo more than sharpen 
the angle of our resolve. Idealism kept us out 
of war, and idealism drove us into it. 

The fume and spume of idealism is oratory, 
sermonizing, talk about morality, duty, patriot- 
ism, rights, and noble purposes. All such 
gushing rhetoric is no more the thing itself than 
foam is the ocean. But, like smoke, there is 
seldom much of it without cause. Men and 
women who were abroad in 1918 must reflect 
curiously on the, shall we say, wearisome pre- 
valence of the moralistic, idealistic note in 
American speech and writing in contrast to its 
restraint and frequent absence in France and 
England. When an Englishman orated upon 
the war to stop war he was usually talking for 
American consumption. This does not mean 
that Great Britain and France were sordid, we 
sincere; on the contrary, it is proof of a tinct- 
ure of the sentimental in our idealism, to which 
I shall later return. But it is additional testi- 
mony to the quantity and the popularity of 

93 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

American idealism in those months. The tone 
of the press at that crucial time was evidence 
of the tone of the people that read and re- 
sponded. And while many a sounding speech 
and impassioned editorial are now, as one reads 
them, a little faded, faintly absurd, like tattered 
war posters on a rural bill-aboard, yet no one 
can doubt the flood of patriotic idealism that 
created them, few will doubt that our war ideal- 
ism was a virtue in 1914-1918. 

It seemed a virtue then, but was it not al- 
ready diseased? When we entered the war, 
the vast majority of Americans publicly and 
privately committed themselves to certain gen- 
eral principles, and, whatever else they fought 
for, believed that they were fighting for them. 
A square deal all around was one, the consent 
of the governed to their government was an- 
other, a third was the substitution, at all costs, 
of justice for violence in the ruling of the 
world. We all assented to these principles, 
most of us assumed them voluntarily as an 

94 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

article of faith, and the average man took them 
as seriously as he is able to take abstractions. 
Peace came, the armistice, the stages of the 
treaty. Nothing could be clearer or more to be 
expected than that sometimes in spirit, often in 
detail, and most seriously in ultimate purpose, 
the treaty in scores of instances ran counter to 
the faiths we had accepted and made common- 
places of speech and thinking. 

I am neither criticizing nor justifying the 
treaty and its included covenant. No one, I 
suppose, but a sentimental optimist could have 
expected a work of logical art in exact con- 
formity with the principles and conditions of a 
new epoch that has scarcely begun, no one at 
least who had ever read history, or studied the 
politics of Sonnino, Clemenceau, and the 
Unionist party. It was bound to have incon- 
sistencies; to reflect as many views as there 
were strong minds in the conference, to be ex- 
perimental, to be a compromise. This is not 
what is astonishing; it is the attitude of the 

95 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

typical American mind toward the treaty ne- 
gotiations. 

In the winter and spring of 1919, while the 
world was burning, while the principles we had 
shouted for were at last in actual settlement, 
this enormous American idealism slept, forgot 
its fine phrases, forgot its pledges to see the 
thing through, was bored because some Amer- 
icans felt that it was our duty to see the thing 
through. We are an uncritical nation despite 
our occasional vehemence of criticism, but we 
have never been so uncritical of major issues as 
in 1919, when the terms of world settlement 
were of acute interest to all but Americans. 
We are an easy-going nation, but we have 
never been so easy-going as in 19 19, when not 
one man in a thousand as much as read the ab- 
stract of the treaty to see whether the things 
he had said he fought for were safeguarded in 
it. The only real fire-spitting fervor struck 
out in this country since the armistice has been 
in defense of our right to let Europe stew in 

96 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

her own juice, and our privilege to tell general 
principles to go hang. And this is an emotion 
almost too narrow to be attributed, even by 
the generous minded, to idealism. 

One answers, of course, that such a decline 
from overheated virtue into indifferentism is 
only human nature at its old tricks, the collapse 
after the New Year's resolution, the weariness 
of being too good, symptoms, in short, of con- 
tent with having 'licked the Hun,'' and a desire 
to get back to work. And the reply is, of 
course this is true. But Europe is not thus 
functioning. There has been a striking con- 
trast in the years since the war between British 
and American attitudes toward treaty negotia- 
tions. In England, exhausted by war as we 
never were, deep in the lassitude of rest after 
struggle, men and women have leaped into criti- 
cism and defense of the ideals embodied in the 
settlement. Peace has seemed to them as vital 
a battle-ground of ideas as war. By and large, 
the plodding mass of us who make money and 

97 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

public opinion have been cold to the contest, un- 
interested. The press of Great Britain has 
fiercely attacked and fiercely defended the mo- 
rale of the treaty; ours has reported it with 
little real criticism and little interest except 
where the league was concerned. Their uni- 
versities have supplied men and parties to fight 
through the principles for which we fought; 
ours have been intent upon how much scholastic 
credit should be given returned soldiers and 
who should get an honorary degree. They 
forced an easy-going premier to stand for a 
victory that was more than conquest; we 
grudged our President the attempt to carry 
through in Paris what in 19 17 we were all 
agreed upon; let our dislike of his methods 
outweigh our deep interest in his ends. If it 
had not been for the great issue of the League 
of Nations, which, forcing Americans to act, 
forced them to remember (some with difficulty) 
what they had believed in and what they had 
learned in 1917 of the dangers of selfish aloof- 

98 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

ness from world problems, if it had not been for 
the fight over the league, the politics of 1919 
would have been as local, as trivial, as weari- 
some, as in the year after a Presidential elec- 
tion. Some scholar in the next decade will 
place side by side the files of a New York daily 
in its moral-idealistic stage of 191 7 and its 
cynical back-to-business mood of 1919; will 
compare the fantastic pledges never again to 
trade with Germany, which were circulating 
in 1 9 18, with the export statistics of 1919; will 
marvel, and perhaps draw conclusions. 

And one wonders, meeting everywhere an 
interest in world affairs that seems dying, a 
national morale that is forgetting its moral 
impulses, a hatred of the professional idealist, 
a weariness of general principles, and a cynical 
distrust of ideas — one wonders whether this 
flaming American idealism so-called was not 
even in 1918 flushed with disease, a virtue al- 
ready dying. 

W^ere we indeed ever really idealistic ? Con- 
99 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

sider the case of the ablest of our manufac- 
turers, who, when the emotional fit was on him, 
proposed to increase the production of idealism 
until every American home should own an ideal 
of the latest model. He gives the order, draws 
the checks, and, naively surprised at the dis- 
covery that you cannot make ideals without 
understanding them, hangs up philosophy, and 
goes back to the motor business. Consider 
the case of our radical papers who fought our 
entrance into a war where American ideals 
were not properly safeguarded, and then pre- 
ferred to risk a treaty without the League of 
Nations, to a league which, though it expressed 
American idealism, was not perfect by their 
judging. Consider the flaming desire to make 
the universe and one's home safe for democ- 
racy, in contrast with the current contempt for 
the ideals of industrial democracy. Perforce 
one wonders whether American idealism, 
healthy or diseased, is not a mere emotion, 
easily roused, never lasting; whether, as a val- 

lOO 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

uable part of our national character, it is not 
an illusion. 

So much needs to be said by way of charge 
and speculation in order to clear the air. If I 
write with some excitement, it is no more than 
the sight of the tumble from great-worded, 
great deeded 19 18 to the indifferent, self- 
regarding, and a little cynical present may ac- 
count for. Certainly in our national past ideal- 
ism has not been an illusion, although it was 
often emotional. Nor, in sober fact, do I doubt 
the essential idealism of the normal American 
mind, especially that American mind which in- 
herits the optimism and the liberal instincts of 
our forefathers. I am merely curious as to the 
exact nature of that idealism as it exists, and 
plays strange tricks, to-day. It seems to be 
a quality more resembling energy than a moral 
characteristic like virtue or vice. It seems, as 
one thinks over these recent manifestations, to 
be a blend of physical virility and nervous sen- 
sitiveness, good or bad, active or inactive, ac- 

lOI 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

cording to the condition and environment of 
the patient. Stir him, and it becomes active, 
beneficent, altruistic. Stir him further, and it 
may become sentimental, with symptoms of 
hysteria. Relax the pressure, and it drops into 
desuetude. These are the habits of American 
idealism, and I doubt whether more can be said 
of them except by way of further descrip- 
tion. But there must be some thoughts, some 
ideas behind to account for these vagaries. 
There must be reasons why Americans idealize 
more readily than other nations, and why, just 
now at least, they so easily tire of their ideal- 
izing. 

Neither the scope of these pages nor my 
knowledge permits me to trace the history of 
American thinking and feeling, to say, as the 
historians some day must, what elements came 
from Europe, what modifications are due to 
pioneer environment, racial mixture, and cen- 
turies of unchecked material development. 
But tentatively, and with all modesty, one may 

102 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

at least seek for light. I find that two great 
figures of our national youth and the ways of 
thinking they represented most help me to un- 
derstand the strengths and the weaknesses of 
American idealism, help to an understanding 
of the phenomena of 1917-20. 

The first is Jonathan Edwards, theologian of 
international importance, leader of the great 
spiritual revival of mid-eighteenth century New 
England, missionary to the Indians, president 
of Princeton, author of works so widely read 
that even now no farm-house garret in New 
England but will yield a sermon or two, a 
treatise on original sin, or his epochal essay 
on the freedom of the will. 

Alas for human reputation! This tireless 
thinker, whose logic built up in entirety an 
impregnable argument worthy of Aquinas, is 
now chiefly remembered as a preacher of infant 
damnation and a thunderer of hell-fire over 
frightened Northampton congregations. But, 
as all wiser critics know, the influence of a 

103 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

great mind is distinct and often different from 
its reputation. What it does, works on and 
on after death, transmuting, transforming; 
what it was in popular repute, soon becomes 
legend and supposed historical fact. Compare 
the reputation of Machiavelli with his achieve- 
ments and influence as described in Macaulay's 
famous essay. 

In actual achievement Edwards, whose mind 
was of unusual lucidity and endurance, crys- 
tallized for Americans the Calvinistic ethics of 
life which were the backbone of Puritan civili- 
zation. Man, by the unarguable might of God, 
is born with a will whose nature may be either 
bad or good. Henceforth his reason is free, 
his choice is free, within the limits that his char- 
acter permits. It becomes therefore supremely 
important that he shall choose and reason virtu- 
ously, for there is no way to be sure that he 
has a good will, that he is among the '^elect" 
except by virtuous action leading to a sense of 
salvation. Thus in every condition of life, 

104 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

without excuse or palliation, the Christian must 
daily, hourly strive to prove that he is one of 
the elect of God, saved from hell-fire by the 
character God has given him. Good intentions 
count for nothing. Good works, if unaccom- 
panied by the sense of spiritual salvation, count 
for nothing. God, Himself blameless, has 
willed sin and sinful men. It is for us to 
prove that we are not among the damned. 

That the system is incredible most moderns 
now believe ; that it is logical, more logical per- 
haps than any later attempt to justify the ways 
of God to man, the student must admit. My 
desire is naturally not to argue, but to em- 
phasize, what can never be too much em- 
phasized, the effect of such thinking upon the 
intellectual life of America. It was believed 
in powerfully and well understood by perhaps 
a majority of one formative generation. Later 
it was not believed in so powerfully, and it was 
but little understood, especially outside of New 
England. But a conviction of the infinite ne- 

105 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

cessity of willing the right became a mental 
habit in American morality that persists and 
becomes a trait and a chief factor, as any reader 
may see, in so-called American idealism. 

Benjamin Franklin was almost the exact con- 
temporary of Jonathan Edwards, but he had 
the inestimable advantage of living longer and 
seeing more; two continents and two ages, in 
fact, were his familiars, and learned from him 
as well as taught him. Franklin, it is clear, 
was strongly influenced by that French eigh- 
teenth century which he loved, with its praise 
of reason and its trust in common sense. But 
he was even more a product of the new Amer- 
ica. America, as Edwards and Cotton Mather 
saw it, was an experiment in godliness. When 
the Puritan scheme should have proved its 
efficacy by an abnormal increase in the number 
of earthly saints, the colonies would have served 
their chief end, and would, so Mather thought, 
decline. The hell-breathing vehemence of Ed- 
wards was chiefly due to his fear that the 

1 06 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

3cheme was failing. He was fighting a spirit- 
ual decline. 

But F.-anklin was a member of the worldly, 
not the spiritual, body of America; he was a 
citizen of a country visibly growing in wealth 
and population. He looked outward, not in- 
ward; forward, not backward. Like Edwards, 
he hated sin; but sin for him was not sin be- 
cause it was forbidden, but forbidden because 
it was sin. Franklin's was a practical moral- 
ity, which was cut to fit life, not to compress 
it. His firm character and the clarity of his 
reason kept his morals high. His ethics were 
admirable, but they were based upon the prin- 
ciple that honesty is the best policy, not upon 
the fear of God. To be ''reasonable" was his 
highest good. ''So convenient it is to be a rea- 
sonable creature," he remarks whimsically, 
"since it enables one to find or make a reason 
for everything one has a mind to do." As long 
as one is a Franklin, with the will to virtue, 
honesty, industry, and thrift that is bred from 

107 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

a good inheritance, in a new and developing 
country, such ethics make for idealism. No 
one was more idealistic in his day than the 
practical Franklin, who wished to form a league 
of virtue of all nations to be governed by rules, 
and supported by the reason of virtuous man- 
kind. 

And here is another palpable strain of Amer- 
icanism, differing from that necessity which 
Edwards trumpeted, but, like it, a stiffener of 
idealistic impulses. Here one places the love 
of a square deal, the desire to do what is right 
because it is ''fair/' the sense of the reasonable- 
ness of justice that freed the slaves, gave Cuba 
self-government, determined our policy toward 
the Philippines, and was horror-struck by the 
invasion of Belgium. It is the idealism of 
good common sense, and together with the 
mental habit of willing the right has been a 
main cause of American idealism. 

Both of these American characteristics are 
operative to-day. Both are now factors and 

io8 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

dangerous factors in our idealism, for the 
strong will of the Calvinists to do right has 
become erratic and perverted, and the common 
sense of Franklin's school has degenerated. 
Here, as I shall endeavor to show, are two chief 
causes for the vagaries of the American mind 
in the years that ended the war. 

The mental discipline which the Puritans 
learned from the fear of a wrathful God re- 
mained a discipline long after it had lost its 
theological basis, and is responsible in no small 
measure for the disciplined will of nineteenth- 
century America to succeed in material en- 
deavors as well as in philanthropic or moral 
purpose. But, divorced from the belief in a 
speedy damnation which had given it cause, 
it was bound to become, and it did become, a 
mere mental habit, a kind of aimless necessity 
of being virtuous. Bolted no longer to a belief 
in a revengeful God who demanded virtue, 
loosed, like an engine from its flywheel, this 
ancestral sense of necessity whirled on by its 

109 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

own momentum. It became will without think- 
ing behind it, which was driven by material 
circumstance instead of religious belief. It be- 
came a restless energy whose aim, as a foreign 
observer has said, seemed to be "mere accelera- 
tion." It became unreasonable, often absurd, 
sometimes hysterical. I find its manifestations 
in the insistence that America must always be 
described as sweet, lovely, and virtuous in dis- 
regard of the facts, in our ''boosting" of pros- 
perity and success by proclaiming them. I find 
them in the determination to be good and happy 
and prosperous immediately and without re- 
gard to circumstance which has created the 
American magazine story and brought about 
national prohibition by constitutional amend- 
ment. This hand-me-down will is responsible 
for much progress, good and bad, in America ; 
it is also responsible for American sentimen- 
talism. It has been a driving force in our 
idealism ; but because it is not so much reasoned 
purpose as a mental habit inherited, it has run 

no 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

wild, become hysterical and erratic. It led us 
to propose to reform the world and to adver- 
tise our intention before our brains were ready 
for the task. It makes our idealism feverish 
and uncertain. 

As for Franklin's rule of common sense, it 
has become a positive deterrent to idealism. 
His idea of conduct reasonably shaped accord- 
ing to the needs of environment was, and is 
to-day, the most solid trait of Americans. It 
is the ethics of modern business, and American 
business has become, and for a little while yet 
will remain, the fundamental America. Nev- 
ertheless, every candid observer will admit, no 
matter how great his faith in the future of his 
country, that the reasonable good sense of the 
Franklin tradition suffered a progressive dilu- 
tion or degeneration throughout the nineteenth 
century. Rational ethics became for the most 
of us materialistic rationalism, still reasonable, 
still ethical in its way, still backed and re- 
strained by common sense (our profiteers have 

III 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

also been philanthropists), but an enemy, 
nevertheless, to all idealism that could not be 
made from steel, brick, rubber, or oil. We 
have been too reasonable to be sordid ; too ma- 
terialistic to remain in the best sense reason- 
able. Far from advocating a league of the 
virtues, our business common sense has been 
fighting a League of Nations. The contrast 
between our moral code and our business code 
has already been overwritten in muck-raking 
literature. Nevertheless, despite exaggeration, 
it exists. Our national life is dual. We can 
stand on our moral foot and our business foot, 
but usually we alternate. In 1918 we rested 
entirely on one; in 1919 we swung with relief 
to the other. Franklin's rule of common sense 
as a stimulus to idealism has broken down. 

What reasonable sense of proportion I my- 
self possess as a descendant of the compatriots 
of Franklin urges me to protest instantly that 
all this is not to be taken as a picture of con- 
temporary America. Rather it is a plucking 

112 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

out merely of two strains of experience that 
all must recognize. But these are perilously- 
interwoven in our national character. They 
affect the validity of our ideahsm. 

The hysterical will drives us into professions 
of virtue we cannot make good. It drove us 
to ''boost" the war; and then, being a restless 
energy sprung from habit rather than from 
conviction, left us exhausted in spirit and cyni- 
cal in mind when the moral profits were ready 
for the gathering. It stirred a passion for the 
League of Nations, rights of small countries, 
democracy, justice, and the rest, and then col- 
lapsed like the second day of ''clean-up" week. 
It set the will going and left the brain unmoved. 

And our common sense, diluted through mil- 
lions, obsessed by the problems of manufacture 
and construction, is in ever greater danger of 
losing that basis of character and enlightened 
reason that alone can make common sense any- 
thing but common. It dreads ideas, distrusts 
theories, is made uncomfortable by altruism 

113 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

that extends beyond the home. As a nation, 
we have not degenerated, for our virile energy, 
our will, our adaptiveness are all as strong as 
ever, stronger perhaps than elsewhere in the 
world. But, as compared with Franklin's, our 
common sense has lost character. It pulled 
back in the great moral and intellectual prob- 
lems of the war; it did not lead. As mani- 
fested in the present struggle over international 
policies, it falls below the ethical standards of 
the nation, whether you tap it in clubs and 
offices or in Congress. In a time of crisis it 
rallies to encounter material problems and is 
invaluable; but morally and intellectually its 
vision is short, its endurance weak. 

The trouble with the American reformer, as 
has often been said, is that he has more energy 
than reason; and this is because he incarnates 
the instinctive, irrational will of which I have 
been writing. The trouble with the American 
materialist is that he has kept his common sense 
while losing his vision. 

114 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

Both, in short, lack an adequate spiritual and 
moral basis ; and so does the American idealism 
that is functioning nobly, but so irregularly, 
to-day. With an irresponsible will driving it 
forward and a matter-of-fact common sense 
holding it back, it suffers too frequently from 
the weakness of all qualities that spring from 
custom rather than from conviction. Its leaf- 
age has spread ; its roots have contracted. 

I am not so unhumorous as to propose that 
the remedy is once again to believe in Jonathan 
Edwards's God and infant damnation; but we 
must go deeper than habit and tradition for 
the springs of our action. Not since the Civil 
War have we as a nation explored our souls, 
sought the channels of our being, tested our 
ultimate faith. This war has been no test. Its 
issues were clear. They appealed to principles 
that we held firmly because we had inherited 
them. It was easier to go in than to stay out. 
Even our material prosperity, apparently, 
stood to gain, not to lose, by entering the con- 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

flict. We made the right choice, but it was 
not hard to make it. To be ideaHstic was easy. 

I do not beHeve that our inheritance either 
of virtuous will or of practical common sense 
will serve us long without renewal. The first 
is vehement in propaganda, prohibition, and 
hysteric excess, but flags when a load of stern 
duty, national or international, is put upon it. 
The second has no end and aim but the making 
of a prosperous America where the grubber 
and the grabber have much and others little. 
It is useful, nay, indispensable, to the economic 
state, but beyond economics — and so much is 
beyond economics! — ^there is little health in it. 
If our idealism is to remain as robust as our 
material prosperity, it must gain what Franklin 
would have described as a basis of enlightened 
reason, or suffer what Edwards would have 
called a conversion — and, preferably, both. 

Samuel's mother was a fine, but somewhat 
rigorous, woman who brought him up in the 
conviction that he had to do right (by which 

ii6 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

she meant -being honest and moral, and going 
to church on Sundays) or shame would come 
upon him. His father was a man whose ''word 
was as good as his bond." He taught his boy 
that working hard and saving money were prob- 
ably the most important things in life, and that 
if you paid your bills, were true to your word, 
and kept an eye upon shifty neighbors, you were 
sure to be happy and successful. 

At the age of fifty the father died from 
hardening of the arteries, the result of too few 
vacations, and the mother became a rather 
morose member of the W. C. T. U. Samuel 
found himself now possessed of half a million 
dollars and a prosperous shoe factory. 

As for the factory, he discovered within a 
year that since the death of his father its suc- 
cess had been due to a new system of piece 
work, which ''speeded up" the worker and gave 
the profits to the proprietor. But there seemed 
no way of changing the system without ruin- 
ing the business. As for his wealth, it brought 

117 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

him new and pleasing associates who were more 
polished and intelligent than he, and whose life 
was so much more cheerful, instructive, and 
interesting than his early experience that he 
could only wish to be like them ; especially when 
he saw that they were far better citizens than 
his father, who, to tell the truth, lived very 
much for his own narrow interests. And yet 
their ideas of pleasure and even of morality 
were quite different from what he had been led 
to suppose were the only proper principles on 
which to conduct one's life, and they never 
went to church. He wanted to 'be honest, he 
wanted to be good ; but neither how to be honest 
in his factory nor how to be good and yet a 
"good fellow" were explained by the teachings 
of his youth. 

For an unhappy year or two he tried to act 
like his father, believe as his mother, and be 
like his neighbors. In addition, in order to 
satisfy a somewhat uneasy conscience, he pre- 
pared to enter politics on a platform of straight 

iiS 



AMERICAN IDEALISM 

Americanism and the full dinner-pail. Then 
in one eventful week his workmen struck for 
an eight-hour day and shop committees, his 
mother announced her intention of bequeathing 
her share of the estate to the Anti-tobacco 
League, his best girl refused to marry him un- 
less he should become an Episcopalian, and 
he was invited by the local boss to subscribe 
to a "slush" fund or give up politics. 

Samuel went to the Maine woods to catch 
trout and think over the situation. What he 
did finally is not told in the story. What he 
decided is, however, of some significance. For, 
brooding over a dark pool in the spruces, he 
concluded that each generation must search out 
the foundations for its own morality, and de- 
termine for itself the worth and power of the 
ideals it proclaims. And so perhaps will 
America. 



119 



CHAPTER V 

RELIGION IN AMERICA 

THE rarest experience in America is a 
discussion of morals. You can hear 
morals preached about, but that is not a discus- 
sion. You can read about morals in arguments 
disguised as essays, but these seldom cause dis- 
cussion. Fully a third of successful American 
plays and stories turn upon a moral axiom, but 
one that we accept without argument, like rain 
in April and the August drouth. One hears 
very little real discussion of moral questions 
here because ''old Americans,'' at least, agree 
in their moral standards as remarkably as did 
the Victorians. 

In this respect we are, indeed, still Victorians, 
hough in others already a century beyond them. 
Some of us may (or did) get drunk, but we 

1 20 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

do not believe in hard drinking; not even the 
saloon-keepers believed in hard drinking. 
Some of us make license of our liberty in sex 
relations ; but the public disapproval of promis- 
cuity is, to fall into the current phrase, nation 
wide. Some of us steal in a large and generous 
fashion, taking from him who hath not business 
ability for the benefit of him who hath shrewd- 
ness and its fruits. But if these actions can 
be described in terms of theft or misappropria- 
tion, every one will agree that they are wicked, 
even stock-holders and profiteers. You cannot 
get up a decent argument on moral questions in 
America, because, as with small boys in war- 
time, no one will take the unpopular side. The 
ethics of America are as definite as a code. 

This accepted and not unlofty moral code, 
with its extension to justice and the rights of 
individuals, is the force behind our idealism 
that has made it an international factor to be 
reckoned with from the days of Jeffersonian 
ideology to our own. Like the dissenters' 

121 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

vote in England, it is a dangerous force to 
oppose. Despite occasional hysteria and sen- 
timentalism, despite its frequent betrayals by 
an unlovely common sense, it is strong because 
it has the momentum of tradition and the 
tenacity of prejudice. Of its worth I am 
American enough to be convinced. Of its in- 
telligence one cannot be so certain. But what 
really concerns all lovers of our hard-built 
civilization is how durable under stress is this 
moral idealism, under such stress as the ap- 
proaching change in our social order is sure to 
bring to morals and morale, as well as to rail- 
road stocks and the Constitution. 

Indeed, the inner fire, the spirit, is not easily 
discoverable in this American idealism with its 
moral causes. Historically, it is easy to ex- 
plain it; habit has carried it on, and common 
sense must usually approve a moral investment 
that has been profitable ; but, nevertheless, it is 
hard to see a continuing raison d'etre for such 
idealism in America. It seems, as I have sug- 

122 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

gested in an earlier chapter, to lack a definable 
spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, 
its dangers, raise constantly the question as to 
the status of religion in America. 

I remember hearing Graham Wallas — who 
will not be suspected of bias in this matter 
— remark that England would not pass out of 
clouds and darkness until she had made for 
herself a new and felt interpretation of religion. 
America, founded by a curious partnership of 
the religious instinct and economic need and 
brought up on the moral and material profits 
of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in 
need of a fundamental spiritual readjustment. 
Every socialist and communist, every corpora- 
tion president and ex-Secretary, every profes- 
sional intellectual and amateur prophet, is de- 
claring his mind on the one thing needful to 
save the world and America. I do not know 
why we, whose profession it is to teach, whose 
duty it is to interpret and to sympathize with 
every motion of the American mind, should 

123 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

hesitate to speak out also in this matter. It is, 
I think, demonstrable that America needs re- 
ligion as much as steel and automobiles, as 
much as a better distribution of wealth and 
cheaper bread and meat. 

The status of religion in America has been 
as peculiar as the status of politics. Our re- 
ligious attitudes have been profoundly affected 
and from early periods by the separation of 
church and state. Struggle against a vested 
institution, dissent from traditional power, con- 
ciliation with sacred authority, have been burn- 
ing points in the modern history of Europe. 
They have made great literature in England 
from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold 
and Swinburne. Our first battle against the 
tyrannical in tradition wherever found was won 
in the Revolution; our second, in the defeat 
of the Federalist party in 1800. 

In those contests we were freed, perhaps too 
early and too easily, from the menace of the 
church as a function of government. Since 

124 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

then we have been, and we still are, freer than 
the European to seek religion wherever it may 
be found. Our great religious literature is 
creative, not protestant. Woolman of the 
Quakers was a seeker; Emerson, in greater 
measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for 
Americans, and, like Woolman, fanning their 
moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau 
were searchers for a new morality; Whitman 
and William James, in their fashion, searchers 
also. 

Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a 
century later than Matthew Arnold. Fed 
from almost identical intellectual sources, he 
is the liberated mind seeking new allegiances, 
Arnold, the rebel not yet free. And in general 
American religion, without reference to its 
quality, has had, like American politics, a status 
some generations ahead of the rest of the world. 
Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were 
prophets for Europe. The independent sects 
of America, none established, all respectable, 

125 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

and the free seekers after new truth which 
sprang from them, seem to have prefigured a 
condition that is common in a world growing 
democratic. 

In truth, we old Americans, who with all 
our faults still best represent America, gained 
freedom of conscience at the expense of shat- 
tering the ideal of a church universal. Re- 
ligion for us came in general to be a personal 
matter because the church, separated from the 
state, lost the visible authority that made it 
easy — or necessary — to trust to an institution 
the responsibility for one's soul. We felt, as 
was to be expected, the need of new authority, 
new sanctions for our religion. And we were 
free, freer than others, to seek and to find a re- 
ligion for democracy. What has been the re- 
sult? 

The results in bourgeois America, which 
goes to the theater, wears the commonly ad- 
vertised collars, sends its children to college, 
and keeps out of the slums and the police-court, 

126 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

are clearly vlsibl'e and highly significant. Four 
classes, interlocking, but distinct enough for 
definition, may be readily described ; and though 
they do not include the recent immigrant or the 
fire-new sophists of radicalism, the strongest 
brains, the most characteristic emotions, and 
the best character in America belong there with 
the mass of the mediocre undistinguished who 
are public opinion and the ultimate America. 

There are, first, the militant advance-guards 
of our idealism, the ethical enthusiasts who 
carry on the moral fervor of America. They 
range, like colors of the spectrum, from the 
rarer violet of the philosophical moralists, in- 
heritors of the New England ethics or the Vir- 
ginia ideology, through the solid blue of the 
organizers of great movements in social re- 
form, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists 
and the Anti-tobacco League. I do not mean 
to be flippant. The irony, if there is irony, is 
bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so 
various an army all certain that by stopping 

127 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

this and beginning that the world can be saved. 
It is their certainty that makes them im- 
pressive — the same certainty which drove our 
colonials toward republican government and 
our pioneers to the conquest of a wilderness. 
Sneers at their banner, ^'Progress," satisfy 
none but the reactionary. Progress where? 
Who knows. Progress for whom? It is 
hard to tell. But only the man who hon- 
estly believes in civilization for the benefit of 
the few can doubt the advance that has been 
made. I should have preferred the twelfth 
century to the twentieth if I could have lived in 
the right Benedictine monastery or been count 
in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Eliza- 
bethan age more than my own if I could have 
voyaged — in the cabin — with Raleigh, been 
Shakespeare's patron, or possessed a manor 
neither too near nor too far from London. I 
still think that life in a good English college, 
with a taste for letters and the proper port, 
is superior to any mental or physical luxury 

128 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside 
from the point. Provengal poetry and perfect 
social intercourse, high adventure, the intellect- 
ual life in an appropriate physical setting, and 
even good port, may come again somewhere on 
the line along which our progress is marching. 
In the meantime, though the war has been a 
cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusi- 
asms of the age have made the opportunities 
of the average man for most good things in 
life better, have made him, in the most accurate 
sense of the word, not nobler, but more civil- 
ized, and particularly in America, where the 
fire of opportunity was first set burning. 

The moral enthusiasts whose religion has 
been transformed into ethical idealism are safe 
from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, 
the tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have 
already reformed out of the brighter parts of 
the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty 
are to follow. We can well afford to risk their 
mistakes anS their excesses, their blind trust in 

129 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere 
energy of will to make the world better. But 
what lies behind this will ? What keeps it from 
decaying? For these men are seldom religious 
in the sense that their reforming zeal springs 
from a deep spiritual need. A part of their 
energy is moral habit ; a part is exactly identical 
with the energy that builds up a great industrial 
plant in order to satisfy a craving for laudable 
action. If the certainty that the community 
must be bettered, can be bettered, should 
slacken, where would it find revival ? In faith, 
hope, and charity? But can hope endure and 
charity be permanent without faith? x\nd 
what is their faith? 

The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, 
I suppose, as that which supported the Stoics 
or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth 
century. They believe in the perfectability of 
man and the pragmatic value of right-doing. 
This, for a strong man, may be enough; but 
it is not a religion. It is questionable whether 

130 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

it would stand adversity. It was not shaken 
in the war, but it is shaking now. If the en- 
thusiasm of the reformers should be spent or 
exhausted, they would have little to fall back 
upon. Their idealism has already shown signs 
of hysteria, spots of sentimentalism, evidences 
of a basis in habit and impulse as much as in 
deep spiritual conviction. 

It has become almost a commonplace to say 
that the spiritual seekers, the second of our ob- 
servable classes — more numerous, I believe, 
in America than elsewhere in the white world 
since the seventeenth century — are products 
of reaction against the dry moral will that 
seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet 
their importance has not always been grasped. 
Commercial America has not only been the 
home of the greatest of modern philanthropies, 
but also the source of the only powerful re- 
ligious sect created in the nineteenth century, 
as well as one of the few new strains in ideal- 
istic philosophy. They are not happy in our 

131 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

commercialism or content with ethical reform, 
those more sensitive spirits whose numbers and 
weight in bourgeois America are evident when- 
ever an emotional crisis arrives. And the free- 
dom from ecclesiastical restraint which was 
won for them by their ancestors has left them 
free to construct new religions. 

But as it was the earnestness of the moral 
enthusiasts that seemed more valuable than 
any reason they had for goodness, so it is the 
spiritual craving of American seekers that is 
more impressive than anything they have 
found. I do not undervalue the hopeful ideal- 
ism of Emerson or the strong protest of the 
Christian Scientists against surrender to petty 
worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may 
generalize in so vast a matter, the seekers of 
spirituality have been singularly out of har- 
mony with the needs of a democracy. They 
have found religions that solace the optimistic 
temperament when it has been duly intellect- 
ualized; they have found medicine for the ills 

132 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

of prosperous people ; but the breadth and often 
the depth of appeal that must characterize a 
religion for all men they have missed or failed 
to seek. The Friends, later called Quakers, 
began with the will that all the world should 
become Friends ; it was only in later stages that 
they regarded themselves as a peculiar people 
with whom only those fitted by temperament 
should join. But it is with such an exclusive- 
ness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate 
religion commence. One can prophesy in ad- 
vance who will or will not be Christian Scien- 
tists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spir- 
itual adventure exhausts itself in emotional 
vagaries, or rises into regions of pure mys- 
ticism where, no matter how noble or how 
satisfying it may be for individual persons, 
we shall never find the religion for a democ- 
racy. 

The third group is again a result of that 
early freeing of America from ecclesiastical 
control ; but its members are those whom such 

133 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, 
if I may call them by that name without offense 
intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose 
modern craving for the sanctions of religion 
leads them back into dependence upon the old 
rites, the old theologies, the old authority, 
which many, indeed, never have left. They, 
in our history, are the Federalists of religion. 
And, like the seekers, they, also, have put 
restrictions of temperament upon their faith. 
For many Americans of the old stock the breach 
with authority made by the Reformation is 
permanent. They could not go back without 
an intellectual debasement that would be de- 
gradation, not humility. For many others the 
scientific revolution of the nineteenth century 
has still further unfitted minds for harmony 
with the forms and pressures of the ecclesias- 
tical past. Sheer scientific materialism as an 
explanation of God and the universe has broken 
down. The need for religion emerges from the 
controversy more palpitating than before. 

134 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

Nevertheless, the science of theology has suf- 
fered from the science of inductive research. 
Tradition carries many a man to the door of 
past beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, 
and he longs to enter. But his way is barred. 
He leans upon and loves the past. He can- 
not enter it. The traditionalist, to give him a 
better and more lovely name, has been a bringer 
of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help 
has been partial only. He is a chaplain at- 
tendant upon the regiments of his own faith. 

But by far the most significant product of 
our precocious religiosity in America and our 
early emancipation from ecclesiastical control 
has been indifferentism — that American in- 
differentism which has been easy because of 
our willingness to be responsible for our own 
evils, wide-spread because of our necessary 
obsession with material development, defensible 
in our century of good luck and the easy op- 
timism that accompanies it. 

Here lies the group by all odds the largest, 

135 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

and certainly worthy of the most anxious 
study. Here belongs the mass of everyday 
Americans upon whom rests the outcome of the 
immediate future. What lies beneath the 
seeming religious indifference of the American 
who is not ritualist, reformer, or seeker for 
spiritual consolation, who is, in short, the av- 
erage American of office, mill, and law-court? 
That is the crux of the problem. 

Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of 
the age, and fashions are always delusive. In 
a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, 
like a day of south wind in July, are soggy, un- 
illumined, one despairs of one's America. The 
human product of too much selling and buying 
has never been attractive; our half-education 
and the semi-intelligence that accompanies it 
have but defined the ill features, like careful 
breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel prin- 
ciple of primitive Christianity that lowliness 
and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If 
you followed these men home, saw their minds 

136 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

freed from the pressure of competition and out 
of the atmosphere of distrust, would your opin- 
ion alter ? Are their religious instincts hidden 
by the mask of American commercialism, in- 
active merely because suppressed by custom 
and fashion ? Are they lying fallow ? Or are 
they like seed too long dormant and decaying? 

If only we knew by what ingenious statistics 
these men might be classified, prophecy would 
not be difficult. If only we knew how many 
have become mere traffickers in bodily com- 
fort, sensualists in fact, whatever they may be 
in name. If only we knew how many in their 
hearts were dumb seekers for some spiritual 
satisfactions that would raise the heart in ad- 
versity, lift the mind above the necessity for 
safety, pleasure, success, so that all might be 
pursued, all enjoyed, without flatness and dis- 
illusion. But no answer is ready; for there 
has been no test of the latent religion of 
America. 

It is true that in the mass of American in- 

137 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

differentism the suppressed religious instinct 
exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional en- 
thusiasm for high things whether in war or in 
peace. It shows itself, or rather its suppres- 
sion, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard 
places. It touches with melancholy many a 
typical American face in which one would ex- 
pect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We 
struggle with our religious emotions in youth, 
suppress them in the middle years ; in old age, 
deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment 
us. Old age is proverbially restless in Amer- 
ica. 

Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how 
much religion is latent in our democracy has 
not come yet ; nor have our moral enthusiasms, 
our spiritual adventures, our reachings for tra- 
dition, been in our day really tested for the 
spirit behind them. There is reason to believe 
that the time is approaching. In a normal evo- 
lution of the bourgeois society that has made 
America, some clear revelation must have come 

138 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

of the religious spirit that as a race and a na- 
tion we are developing. Doubtless we would 
slowly have found our way to an expression 
more true to our nature than any of the partial 
modes so far allowed us. But there will be no 
normal, or at least no slow, evolution in the 
religious emotions of the old Americans. A 
factor from without, a sudden emergency, calls 
for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual as- 
sets. All, in every class, who are responsible 
for the American inheritance of ideals and 
morale and character are challenged, but espec- 
ially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the 
conflict between spirit and matter can stay neu- 
tral no longer. 

Bourgeois America, which means most of 
America, is, as every one sees, on the verge of 
a revolution like the political-social revolution 
of 1800. For a century we have pursued 
economics, and now economics is pursuing us. 
A new class is coming to the front, and yet that, 
perhaps, is of minor importance in America, 

139 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

where money and a little education extinguish 
distinctions between classes in two decades. 
What is coming with more significance is a new 
social system, wherein a new control of in- 
dustry and a more equitable distribution of the 
products thereof is to be substituted for com- 
petitive individualism. Many are skeptical of 
the proposed practices by which this revolution 
is to be accomplished; few now doubt that its 
theory is correct and will some day be demon- 
strated. 

But there has never been a revolution of any 
kind in world history that did not bring with it 
a revolution of all that tradition had established 
and custom made familiar. And this revolu- 
tion, peaceful or otherwise, that is upon us dif- 
fers from earlier examples in that its economic 
nature is clearly distinguished and, therefore, 
its challenge to all that we term esthetic, cul- 
tural, spiritual, religious, doubly sharp and di- 
rect. Food, clothing, and recreation, not re- 
ligious or political liberty, are its legitimate, but 

140 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

also its only expressed, objects. If it gains 
these at the expense of the soul — of what we all 
understand by the soul in the ancient warning, 
^'What is a man profited, if he shall gain the 
whole world, and lose his own soul?'' — if it 
gains material welfare and material welfare 
only, it will f ai) ; and if it fails, we all go down 
with it. 

In western Europe, one guesses, the struggle 
between a socialism always threatening to be- 
come purely materialistic and our own imper- 
fect order will be differently conducted. 
There, and, especially in France and Great 
Britain, church organizations are powerful 
politically, socially, and in their grip upon the 
popular imagination. They will sharpen the 
conflict and confuse the issues, making the 
struggle seem to resemble many earlier combats 
between church and anti-church. But in 
bourgeois America no such easy and fallacious 
division will be possible. Here the question as 
to whether the new order is to satisfy the re- 

141 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

ligious and moral, as well as the economic, 
needs of society will rest squarely upon the in- 
dividual person. No church can speak for 
America, for no church ever has held or ever 
can hold Americans together. The responsi- 
bility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be 
personal. It will come to the question of how 
much religion is possessed by the normal Amer- 
ican. When he is aroused by a struggle that 
sweeps into far wider questions than the tariff 
or the income tax, when his method of work- 
ing, his method of living, his method of think- 
ing, are all challenged by a new and militant 
social order, more dormant idealism, more 
latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be 
aroused than one would ever have suspected in 
that shrewd and easy-going face in the Pullman 
smoker. Will religion be aroused also? 

It is essential that we should bring about a 
better distribution of wealth; that we should 
give every child the equal opportunity that 
Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the vague, 

142 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

but magnificent, phrases of the Declaration o£ 
Independence. Democracy cannot be said to 
have been tried until we have made an economic 
democracy, and we are too far on the road of 
democratic experiment to stop half-way. But 
it is even more essential that we should carry 
on into the new community our moral enthu- 
siasm, our ideals, and also that reverence for 
the shaping power, and love for its manifesta- 
tions that lie behind them, and constitute the re- 
ligious emotion which I shall not here attempt 
otherwise to define. Many fear that the nice 
taste, the trained mind, which have been borne 
upon the crest of civilization, will go down in 
the welter of indistinguishable breakers. 
There is little danger of this, since already it 
is the intellectuals who direct, and will direct, 
the new movement; and the professional man 
stands to gain as much as the laborer by a 
peaceful revolution. But in a sociaHstic world, 
built on the recovery of the unearned incre- 
ment, standardized by wages, whose raison 

143 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

d'etre is the distribution of wealth, it is the 
religious instinct, with all that its free develop- 
ment implies for democracy, that is in the grav- 
est danger. If we all become relatively rich — 
and this is an idea of the earthly paradise that 
socialism undoubtedly encourages — how many 
will crawl through the eye of the needle? 

The labor party is not immediately respon- 
sible for the saving or the freeing of the re- 
ligious instinct. Its first objectives are the 
comforts and material opportunities of civili- 
zation; and until these are reached we have no 
right to expect religious leadership from the 
proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the 
old American, the bourgeois American. He 
has inherited the spiritual tradition of his an- 
cestors; he has profited by emancipation from 
superstition and institutional tyranny; he has 
lived in a comfortable world with opportunities 
to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts 
and education. He is not going to be crushed 
or driven out of his inheritance; there are too 

144 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

many of him, and he too closely resembles in 
everything but habit of life the proletariat that 
is rising. Upon this American rests the 
burden of spiritualizing as well as educating 
his new masters — upon the moral enthusiasts, 
the traditionalists, the seekers, most of all. It 
is such a task as the church faced in the dark 
ages, when barbarians had to be not only spirit- 
ualized, but civilized as well. It is a lesser 
task, for our new invaders are not barbarians, 
and their leaders are intellectually the equal of 
ours. Whether the outlook for success is 
greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the 
enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our 
will that man should make more than a market 
of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the 
great wills of earlier centuries ? 

No one can answer ; but of this we can be as- 
sured, that the solution rests in American in- 
differentism. If the commercial American is 
as material as he looks, if common sense is his 
only good, if his idealism is merely inherited 

145 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

habit, if he responds to two impulses only, rest- 
lessness and sentimentality, then he will go over 
to socialism in its most mechanical phase and, 
instead of saving the new party, he will ruin it. 
Potentially the most ardent supporters of a 
purely materialistic socialism, in which the in- 
dividual person counts for nothing aside from 
his appetites, are precisely the "practical" busi- 
ness men who now curse the new order most 
loudly because it threatens their accumulations. 
For them it is civil war between seekers for the 
dollar ; and civil war is always the bitterest, and 
the soonest healed. Such men have been our 
leaders. Is the army behind them? 

I think that the rank and file of bourgeois 
America are less concerned with wealth and the 
struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think 
that they are not so much dazzled by millions 
as in the 'nineties ; more anxious for simplicity 
of heart, which spells content, and worthiness 
of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one 
would guess from Wall Street or Broadway or 

146 



RELIGION IN AMERICA 

public life in the Middle West. I think that, 
while distrusting the economic paradise of the 
more material socialists, they are closer in sym- 
pathy to a thoughtful laborer than to a cynical 
capitalist. If the religious instinct among 
them emerges as a disgust for petty emotions, 
as a passionate interest in humanity, as a will- 
ingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for 
a fuller life more generously shared, if the re- 
ligion of our democracy finds no more ex- 
pression than this, the crisis will pass. If even 
thus far indifTerentism should yield to active 
spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie would cease 
being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the 
triumph of the proletariate, since, if there was 
anything good in our old stock, we could con- 
vert them to it. 

But if the American has lost his religious 
instincts, if behind his practical common sense 
and his vigorous idealism and his eager experi- 
ments in spirituality there is nothing but a rest- 
less energy working upon the momentum of 

147 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

convictions long dead, then let the new Amer- 
icans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out. 

With all humbleness, with a full realization 
of the trivialities of hustle and bustle in which 
we have sunk our religion, with concern for 
our escape from easy-going optimism and skep- 
tical content, I, for one, feel too sure of the 
depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the 
fundamental religiosity of the American char- 
acter at its truest, to admit for a moment that 
conclusion of despair. 



148 



CHAPTER VI 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

**Fix't in sublimest thought behold them rise 
World after world unfolding to their eyes, 
Lead, light, allure them thro' the total plan 
And give new guidance to the paths of man." 

TIESE were the modest aspirations for 
American genius, and especially Amer- 
ican literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, 
the once famous author, in his ''Columbiad" of 
1807. 

It was not a democratic literature, as we un- 
derstand the term, that Barlow, and hundreds 
of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped 
and expected to see arise in the new republic. 
It was not a literature that would interpret the 
homely, though vigorous, personality of a new 
nation. Nothing so concrete and so common- 

149 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

place as this would have raised their ardor to 
such a pitch. The excitable critics of that day 
were concerned with the absolute, the ideal, and 
the abstract. Liberty, not equality, had at last 
found a dwelling-place, and the free spirit of 
man was to expand in an illimitable continent 
as never before, and create the poetry of 
freedom and the epic of liberated mankind. 
But their vast expectations were based upon a 
misconception and surrounded by fallacies. 
They have not been realized; and this is one 
reason for the prevailing idea that literary 
America has been a disappointment, that the 
life of the mind in America has lagged be- 
hind its opportunities, that we are a backward 
race in literature and the arts. We seem 
children to-day beside the dreams of our 
ancestors. 

It is easy enough to see now that a race which 
had to construct a nation in a continent in large 
part scarcely habitable was not ready to sing the 
epic of freedom. Freedom had been won, but 

ISO 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

whether it would be possible to possess and en- 
joy it depended not upon lyrical interpretation, 
but upon statecraft, the broadax, toil, transpor- 
tation, and the rifle. And when the pioneer- 
ing days were over, political freedom, freedom 
of conscience and the individual man, belonged 
as truly to other great nations who were equally 
entitled to create the literature of the free mind. 
To expect the ideals of liberty to appear in 
American literature was legitimate, but to look 
for a great poetic outburst in nineteenth- 
century America just because this republic first 
established a new political order was no more 
reasonable than to demand a new style in archi- 
tecture from the erectors of the first capitol in 
the trans- Alleghany wilderness. 

What should have been asked of us, at least 
after the defeat of the Federalist party had 
made certain, what before was only probable, 
that America would become a democracy, was 
a literature which should express the ideals per- 
vading our particular brand of democratic life, 

151 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

a literature which should describe a society in 
which social distinctions were elastic, oppor- 
tunity was superabundant, and, for the first 
time in the modern world, the common people 
become more powerful than the uncommon. A 
democratic literature could rightly have been 
expected from America. But such a literature 
would never have been termed ''sublimest 
thought" by our early enthusiasts. It would 
have to suffer from the tawdriness of the 
masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. 
It would have to be more prose than poetry, for 
American life outwardly was prosaic except 
upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous 
there. It would have to struggle upward like 
a flapping heron, not soar like the eagle of our 
dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in 
most periods of the republic, few literary 
dreamers even wished that America should be- 
come a democracy. 

In many respects we got, and got very soon, 
such a literature, and much of it has endured. 

152 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

The prose or poetry that took upon itself to let 
the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally 
gone into oblivion, and with reason ; it is either 
crude and blatant, or solemn and hackneyed 
pretentiousness, like Barlow's ''Columbiad" 
and much of Dwight's '^Conquest of Canaan/' 
The ''less enraptured" strains of Irving and 
Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and 
Bret Harte, in which the hopes, the prejudices, 
the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a nascent 
civilization were expressed in prose as well as 
poetry, and in humor more frequently than in 
epic grandeur, have had a thousand times more 
virility. They have sprung from a social and 
esthetic need, not a romantic conception, and 
though not an epoch-making celebration of 
freedom finally brought to earth, they have been 
a solid contribution to the literature of the 
world and a beginning of the literature of the 
American democracy. 

The real issue of course was not Freedom 
and Liberty and the other capitalizations of the 

153 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real 
question is whether American literature has 
met its proper, not its assumed, specifications. 
If one considers the past, the answer inclines 
toward the affirmative. 

There have been two chief strains in Amer- 
ican literature, not always distinct, but in origin 
different. In the first belong those writers 
whose dominant purpose has been to appeal to 
the best in the many; and by the best I mean 
the finest or the deepest emotions, and by the 
many I mean the accessible minds of the de- 
mocracy. Emerson belongs primarily here, 
and Hawthorne, and, though he would have 
denied it. Whitman. Henry James in his 
earlier stories is a lovable example; and when 
he pursued his magical art into realms where 
only the trained appreciation could follow, 
Mrs. Wharton put on the mantle. In the 
second have been the more numerous writ- 
ers whose chief purpose, not always a con- 
scious one, has been to touch and interest and 

154 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

arouse not so much the best as the commonest, 
the most universal emotions. Cooper is the 
most excellent example of great writing in this 
group. Mark Twain when not misanthropic, 
Bret Harte in all moods, Whittier and Long- 
fellow, Riley and O. Henry, and a host of the 
less distinguished, also belong there. 

But far more important than this division in 
purpose, which, after all, is hard to make and 
harder still to keep, is the fact, if one may speak 
of high esthetic matters in a biological fashion, 
of constant cross-fertilization between these 
strains, and especially in the men we call great. 
Americans who felt impelled to write of the 
ideal best have not forgotten the needs of a na- 
tion slowly moving toward democracy. Those 
who wrote to amuse and interest the populace 
have felt in a curious fashion their respon- 
sibility for what they considered American 
ideals. Tribute has been paid by both sides, 
though each in its own fashion, to democracy ; 
and this makes an unexpected congruity be- 

155 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

tween appeals to the best and satisfactions for 
the many, between Emerson and popular fiction. 
The scholar presents his idealistic optimism as 
an attempt to explain where the eager swarm 
ought to be winging. The story-teller, though 
inspired not by ideas, but by the chance to in- 
terest an energetic society absorbed in the con- 
quest of nature and hot-blooded with the taste 
of success, yet feels bound to urge what he 
feels to be American morality and American 
idealism. 

This common sympathy with democracy is 
the hope of American literature in the sharp 
tests of our nationality now almost upon us. 
Emerson and Cooper, Hawthorne and Mark 
Twain, are examples of what once it could do. 

Emerson was a man who never courted or 
obtained popularity, who hitched his readers to 
a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who 
wrote always for minds that may have been 
democratic, but certainly could not have been 
common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an 

156 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

aristocrat in tastes, a democrat by sympathy 
and conviction, whose stories, even his bad 
stories, contained that essential adventure, that 
rapid and unexpected and successful action, 
which satisfies the universal craving for strug- 
gle well ended, stories so popular that his ene- 
mies were entranced by them even while they 
abused him. 

The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the great- 
ness of Emerson is the airy strength of his 
ideology, his permanence in the history of 
American civilization is determined by the ex- 
pression he gave to the moral optimism of the 
typical American. And if the popularity of 
Cooper was due to the unflagging interest of 
his adventure and the romance of his actors 
and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him 
more than a good story-teller and gives him 
great place in the social history of America is 
his incarnation of the ideals and the morality 
of a native democracy in Deerslayer, whom all 
Americans could understand and admire. 

157 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. 
Hawthorne was a moralist romancer whose 
austere talents forced admiration and a some- 
what doubtful popularity. Twain touched the 
universal note of humorous exaggeration so 
early and so readily that his stern moral basis 
went unremarked. Men read him for humor 
as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing 
the ideas of each as unconsciously as the child 
takes medicine in a sugared glass. 

Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of 
lofty moral ideals is more evident than any ap- 
peal to the masses, yet the most careless reader 
feels that his warnings are for a new world that 
has broken with tradition and must face its 
problems of sin and sex in a democracy of con- 
science. And if Mark Twain writes obviously 
to amuse the democracy, yet he seldom fails to 
preach to them also. "Huckleberry Finn," to 
the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other 
things an epic of the injustice, the inconsistency 
of sophisticated man and his social system, seen 

158 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

through the eyes of the new world on the 
Mississippi, where tradition, in the fresh, crude 
light, showed its seams of decay. There is a 
tract upon slavery in ''Huckleberry Finn," and 
another upon dueling, and a third on social dis- 
tinctions, and a fourth upon conventionalized 
religion. And readers of Clemens will not 
forget how the bones of his acrid philosophy 
wore through the skin of his humor in those 
later books, especially in 'The Mysterious 
Stranger," where a hatred of social injustice 
and the melancholy foreboding which has al- 
ways accompanied the optimism of American 
democracy had such full escape that the pub- 
lishers were led to print it as a fairytale for 
children that it might be enjoyed by minds too 
unobservant to trouble with its warnings. 

I do not wish to seem to be docketing all 
American literature in these brief compari- 
sons. What I desire is to point to this com- 
mon interest of our writers in the needs of 
democracy. Whitman, who wrote always for 

159 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

the most vigorous and sometimes for the best 
emotions of the many, might continue the ar- 
gument. Howells, whose zest for the f amihar 
experience kept his penetrating intellect busy 
with problems important for democracy, is an- 
other example. Poe, and Henry James in his 
later years, fall without both groups, being as 
indifferent to democracy as they are solicitous 
for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it 
is by such men that the writers who sway the 
masses are trained in the technique of their 
craft. 

In short, by and large, our literature is re- 
markable for its substructure of what might be 
called democratic idealism — idealism applied to 
the needs of a growing democracy. If the 
reader doubts, let him compare Emerson with 
Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with 
Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and an- 
swer whether our writers have not been formed 
by the social needs of America. 

That this is true of so many men, and has 
i6o 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

led to the cross-fertilization between popular 
writers and intellectuals of which I have writ- 
ten above, is perhaps more readily explained 
when one considers how homogeneous our so- 
ciety has been, how few and how slight its 
mental cleavages. Conservative and radical, 
traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, democrat 
and aristocrat — such clefts have not gone so 
deep with us as with other nations. Except for 
times of stress, as in the decade between 1765 
and 1775, or in the years just before the Civil 
War, it would be hard to group, for example, 
our writers by fundamental differences in their 
philosophy of living. Whitman one could 
classify, and Poe and Irving, but the difficulty 
rapidly increases as the list lengthens. We 
have been homogeneous by a common tradi- 
tion of liberalism, by a common environment 
varying not too greatly between Boston and the 
newer West. And our literature has re- 
sembled us. 

And now, when at last our literature, like our 
161 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

politics and our economics, must at last 
challenge world scrutiny, this national charac- 
ter, and all that represents it, has come sud- 
denly to seem of vast importance. We have 
become vividly aware of it, and we realize that 
we are in dire need of self-expression — of self- 
expression by new literature. The self-con- 
sciousness of Americans throughout the nine- 
teenth century, which showed itself keenly in 
their restlessness under foreign criticism and 
their irrepressible desire to talk about God's 
country, was of a different kind. It was due to 
a nervous uncertainty as to the success of the 
American experiment. We were more con- 
cerned with what others thought of our quali- 
ties than with what we were or had been. But 
three things have altered our situation radi- 
cally, and made us think more of character and 
less of reputation. 

The first is the absolute success, as success is 
measured by the world's finger, of this Ameri- 
can experiment. The hope of the founders to 

162 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

establish a stable and prosperous republican 
government where life, property, conscience, 
and opinion were safe has been realized. 

The second and more sensational change 
came from the Great War, which gave us that 
quiet confidence in our national strength that 
comes when recognition from without confirms 
the fact and makes self-assertion unnecessary. 

The third, and probably the most important, 
has been the rise to intellectual influence and 
cultural and social power of aliens — Irish, Ger- 
man, most of all Jews — ^who, unlike the earlier 
immigrants, do not cherish as their chief wish 
the desire to become in every sense American. 
Such phenomena as an Alexander Hamilton or 
Thomas Paine, becoming almost from the day 
of their landing more native than the natives, 
are becoming rarer and rarer. More and 
more we must count upon cosmopolitans of 
brains and ability among us who know not Is- 
rael, though they may love the traditions of 
their home lands even less. It is this new 

163 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

America, heterogeneous, brilliant, useful, but 
disturbing, that has more than anything else 
sharpened the self-consciousness of America, 
turned us toward introspection, made us sensi- 
ble of our homogeneity, and the new alignments 
inevitable for the future. 

And just as at the turn of the eighteenth 
century enthusiasts were clamoring for a new 
literature from America, in which freedom and 
liberty should have their apotheosis, so now the 
awakened consciousness of Americans of the 
older stock is clamoring for the expression of 
what they vaguely denominate, and still more 
vaguely describe, as Americanism. Like all 
such terms called forth by a crisis and displayed 
like a flag or a button, the term is at the same 
time indefinite and full of significance. Ten 
men and women will in ten different ways de- 
fine it. And yet none can doubt that vast feel- 
ing lies behind the word, and would crystallize, 
if power were given it, into an expression of our 
national experience and aspirations and ideals 

164 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

as we have lived with them and seen them de- 
velop for a century. 

And opposed to this clamor for a literature 
of Americanism is another call, not loud yet, 
but rising — a demand for a different literature, 
mordant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, which 
will cut at the sentimentalities in which our 
idealism has involved us, strike at the moribund 
liberalism which we still regard as our basis of 
action, take issue with the moral standards that 
have been received as irrevocable because they 
were American. Keenly aware of the need for 
a more honest and more vigorous expression of 
what America means to-day, and sensitive to 
these caustic attacks upon all that we have 
called American, the thoughtful mind finds 
little to console it in the clever, sentimental writ- 
ing which, with sewing-machines, dental pastes, 
ready-made clothes, and cheap motor-cars, has 
become one of the standarized products of 
America. 

There has been one response already to the 

165 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

awakening national consciousness, and this, 
curiously enough, has been almost identical 
with the reaction of the new republic a century 
and more ago to its responsibilities. Then the 
first writing which commanded attention here 
and abroad was to be found in so-called state 
papers, declarations of Congress and legisla- 
tures, pamphlets by Adams and Hamilton and 
Jefferson. And the first response to our 
modern clamor for Americanism has also been 
in state papers, beginning perhaps with Roose- 
velt's administration and continuing through 
Wilson's messages and the many documents on 
the war. The worth and significance of many 
of these public utterances have commanded 
world-wide respect, and possible permanence in 
literature. 

Yet it is rarely that state papers can satisfy 
a national need for literature. They are too 
restricted in their interests and too occasional 
in their provenance. It is only once in a 
century that a Gettysburg Address sums up the 

i66 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

political and moral philosophy of millions or a 
discourse on the needs and obligations of de- 
mocracy unites public opinion in America and 
Europe. The emotions of the race seek outlet 
and interpretation in pure literature, and here 
the American response is more doubtful. 

None of the more popular brands of con- 
temporary writing seems to satisfy the craving 
for national self-expression. It is true that we 
are going in for universals. Our books reach 
the hundred thousands, and our magazines the 
millions. The successful writer of plays, 
stories, or special articles trades in the thoughts 
that circulate through a vast community of 
common education, experience, and environ- 
ment. The result is to spread and perpetuate 
the ideals and the liberal hopes that we call 
American, but also to stereotype and thus 
weaken their influence. They become counters 
in a game, or, better still, standardized foods 
for the imagination, whose popularity is certain 
until the fashion wears out. The writer of ad- 

167 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

venturous fiction to-day uses the same formulas 
as did Cooper, because he writes for a people 
still true to the mold of that America which 
they have inherited directly in family life, or 
indirectly in the schools. But his idealism is 
faint beside Cooper's; his ''strong, simple 
Americans'' too often mere fabrications when 
compared with Deerslayer, or crude, vulgar- 
ized approximations, like sculptures of the 
decadent fourth century. Vulgarization is the 
menace of democratic literature — vulgarization 
by smart and cheap short stories, by plays 
where the wit is raw, the sentiment mushy, the 
characters, like their language, cheap and mean. 
Slang can be racy; colloquialism belongs to a 
literature of the people; to be homely is often 
to be lovable and true : but a literature, no mat- 
ter how moral, which in its lack of clarity and 
sweetness is like a glass of dirty water, is a 
heavy price to pay for mere circulation. The 
appeal to universals is essential in a democracy, 
but unless clarified by love and hope and con- 

i68 



LITEIL\TURE IX AMERICA 

viction. It leads toward universal vulgarity. 
Xor does the prospect cheer if one looks to 
the contemporary Brahmins, who seek not the 
universal, but the particular; who write for the 
best, not the broadest, emotions of democracy. 
Lowells and Emersons have not yet reappeared 
in our society. Xo Emerson has philosophized 
the reactions of America to international obli- 
gation; no Lowell assailed militarist and pacif- 
ist alike in the war : no Whitman even has sung 
commonplace America become momentarily 
heroic in the cause of a half -imder stood democ- 
racy. We have had an abundance of writing 
directed to line minds and fine souls, but it has 
lacked the authentic note of national inspira- 
tion. 

•Perhaps the coldness of our intellectual 
literature has been due to the specialization of 
the age. A Lowell, an Emerson, even a Long- 
fellow, has been dimcult for the last three 
decades. Learned men, like these, have been 
driven by the public opinion of their world 

169 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

toward investigation and scientific research. 
They have been weighted with a frightful re- 
sponsibihty for facts; they have been better 
scholars than their predecessors, but less effec- 
tive citizens. The tool-cutter nowadays knows 
only his own operation. The scholar and 
philosopher have a lifetime of labor assigned 
them, with no time to become acquainted with 
their United States. In nineteenth-century 
America there was little place for the scholar. 
He was driven into the world, and if scholar- 
ship lost, we profited. Now his corner is built 
for him, and he has gone into it. 

As a result of all this we face a very real 
danger. American literature, with its burden 
of ideals and experience, being cheapened 
by writers for the mob and deserted by the 
academician, may lose its virility and pale be- 
fore a new literature of cosmopolitanism, which 
could find no better breeding-place than Chi- 
cago or New York. 

Artistically, this might be no calamity. 
170 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

Such a society as a great American city 
presents has never before been seen in the 
world, not even in Rome, and the international 
democracy which it forecasts is worthy already 
of a great literature, has, indeed, already begun 
one. But we old Americans, even though our 
age is of only two generations, are not yet ready 
for international democracy. Our own racial 
character has not received its final stamp, come 
to full self-expression, established itself as the 
permanent influence upon the world's develop- 
ment which our career and our opportunities 
should make it. To rush into literary interna- 
tionalism before the long American experience 
has ripened into a national democracy would be 
to skip a step. It is to commit again the error 
of our forefathers, who proposed an epic of 
liberty before we had freed ourselves from the 
burden of economic development. 

And what we need is precisely such a cross- 
fertilization between the mind that reaches for 
the best and the imagination which feels for 

171 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

the many, as one finds in varying measures in 
Mark Twain and Holmes, in Cooper and Whit- 
man and Emerson. It must be a different and 
perhaps a more mature product, but nothing 
else can make American ideals worth saving in 
literature, for nothing else can grasp the 
shrewd native quality of this people, which is 
still pervasive through all our alien swarms. 

For three centuries now we have been at our 
experiment in democracy. We have been 
sordid and we have been magnificent. We 
have been timorous and we have set examples 
for hardihood in man. We have stumbled 
blindly on our road, and we have had great 
moments of illumination. We have not made 
a perfect democracy, but perhaps more men, 
women, and children have been happy in 
America than elsewhere in world history. 
And on the whole our course has been consist- 
ently onward. No purpose of the founders has 
failed to continue ; no valuable element of char- 
acter has yet been lost by the way. We are no 

172 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

worse men, by and large, than our forefathers. 
And either this great experiment is worth some- 
thing or it is not. 

If it is worth something, it must pass into 
literature, and find men to make it pass. And 
these men and women must be lovers of what 
we have done here and what we are, as the 
young poets of England at war were above all 
lovers of their blessed England. They cannot 
be scoffers at our loose-held ideals and our 
nervous commercialism, who scold, which is 
easy, a great, though uneven, nation, but do not 
search out the cause of its greatness and pro- 
claim its hope. Nor can they be recluses con- 
temptuous of that public in whose progressive 
refinement lies the only chance for democracy. 
Nor mere buyers and sellers of emotion who 
have learned the speech of the great beast, as 
Hamilton called the common people, only to 
make profit by it. 

But you cannot summon a literature from 
the vasty deep by calling for it in oratorical 

173 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

vein. Perhaps, even now as I write, some wise 
youth, who takes his task more seriously than 
himself, has begun in humor a poem that is 
meant for some newspaper column, but will be- 
come a better description than an essay can 
give of the American who has been doing so 
much, but thinking also, who still knows how 
to grin at misfortune, and is not yet ready to 
declare himself bankrupt in ideas, deficient in 
character, or pallid in imaginative faith. As 
a nation we did our boasting early and got it 
out of our system; but the confidence and the 
strength and the hope that inspired that boast- 
ing remain, and approach fruition. 



174 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 

IN the preceding chapters there has been 
much said of conservatism and radicahsm, 
of ideahsm and the reUgious instinct, of Htera- 
ture that expresses the soul of a race. Never- 
theless, when we look about in this our Amer- 
ica, it is painfully clear that not these absolutes 
but man who makes and possesses them must 
chiefly concern us. It is the American who will 
make or break his religion, his literature, his 
poHtics. He is the entity. He is our destiny. 
And therefore one comes back after a survey 
of American traits, their strengths, and their 
weaknesses, to the man himself. Can we name 
him in this hive of millions? Can we find an 
everyday American that will be accepted here 
as typical, and be recognized abroad ? If there 

175 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

is such a type, it will be among the middle class, 
the bourgeois Americans, that we shall discover 
it. The landholding aristocracy has passed. 
The moneyed aristocracy is in the best (and 
sometimes in the worst) sense bourgeois. Cos- 
mopolitans are few. The intellectual aristoc- 
racy is but half emerged, like a statue of 
Rodin's, from the common clay. 

What we find now is the middle class incar- 
nate. What we may expect soon is the 
finished product of bourgeois life in America. 
For it is clear that this life is now in full career. 
We exult in it, and its characteristic virtues. 
We deprecate aristocracy. We heap scorn 
upon the proletariat and persecute its prophets. 
Better evidence still, no sooner does a new 
group rise to security in our social system than 
it becomes visibly bourgeois, and, what is more 
important, mentally bourgeois. This has been 
true of the railway employees, the carpenters, 
the plumbers, the tenant farmers, and many 
others. It has been also true of the "aristoc- 

176 



THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 

racy" in the old sense of the word, whether na- 
tive or European. They have come into the 
fold, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes at a run 
with poverty barking behind them. All these 
groups have been captured by the dominant 
class. And if the nature of our industrial 
system still keeps them in alignment against the 
capitalist (who is the soul of bourgeoisie) or 
dependent upon him, nevertheless they think as 
he does on all questions not involving work and 
wages, and especially in religion, politics, and 
morality. They act as he does; and the labor 
groups are coming to fight as he does, and for 
the same ends. 

All major influences in our American life 
seem to be directed toward this consummation, 
which is triumphant, or dismal, according to 
your point of view. The racial factor may 
seem to be an exception, but is not. It is true 
that as the old American assimilates more and 
more non-Teutonic and non-Latin races to his 
way of living, his psychology alters, and his 

177 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

habits are likely to follow. It is also true that 
the immigrant belongs prevailingly to the 
peasantry or the proletariat. But the immi- 
grant has substantially no influence upon the 
dominant class until he is Americanized. And 
he is not Americanized in any true sense until 
he leaves his quarter and begins to read the 
papers, go to the theatres, eat the food, talk 
the talk, and think the thoughts of the Amer- 
ican; in a word, until he becomes bourgeois. 
And in the majority of cases this takes at least 
one generation. 

Economic conditions, on the other hand, 
favor this triumph of the bourgeoisie. We 
seem to be entering upon a period when a vastly 
greater number of men and women will have 
reasonable security of moderate income. But 
security of a moderate income, which means a 
guaranteed mediocrity, is the mainstay, is al- 
most the cause, of the bourgeois spirit, just as 
privilege was the support of the aristocracy. 
And if in the next generation ten times as many 

178 



THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 

families can count on a cost plus basis of living, 
this will but increase the middle class. It will 
makfe, to be sure, more education, more refine- 
ment, and perhaps more cerebration possible; 
but such a circumstance will not radically affect 
the character of the typical American. 

Culturally, we already see the results of the 
many influences which are making the United 
States bourgeois in warp and woof. Our traits 
are not the fine exclusiveness, the discrimina- 
tion, the selfishness of an aristocracy. Nor are 
they the social solidarity, the intellectual de- 
mocracy, the intolerance of a proletariat. One 
finds rather individualism in opinion and unity 
in thought. One finds conservatism in insti- 
tutions and radicalism in personal ambitions. 
One finds a solid, though dull morality, a dis- 
trust of ideas, a plentiful lack of taste, an 
abundance of the homely virtues of industry, 
truth telling, optimism, idealism, and charity, 
which, in an age that suits such talents, make a 
man healthy, wealthy, and, in his own genera- 

179 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

tion, wise. Such a cultural level, and such a 
national character are becoming more and more 
familiar in America. 

There must be some peak ahead; some top 
of the curve when the bourgeois spirit, even in 
the United States, will have reached the climax 
of its power, and the height of its vigor, and 
will begin to lose its sharpness of outline, and 
to give way to the spirit of the next age, be 
that what it may. 

This peak is perhaps nearer than we suppose. 
What will happen afterwards lies in darkness, 
but must depend in some measure upon the 
temper of the bourgeoisie ; and as America bids 
fair to be the capital of Bourgeoisia, upon the 
temper of America. The question may be 
posed this way. Are we, who are no longer 
the middle class, since there is no power other 
than spiritual or intellectual above us, are we 
proposing to imperialize, or to federalize the 
world which we dominate? 

Is the bourgeois conception of security for 
i8o 



THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 

all, and superiority (other than economic) for 
none, to be forced upon the years ahead? Is 
our democracy, as Brooks Adams thinks, a 
democracy of degradation, a level to which all 
must be either lifted, or lowered? Will we 
hold back, as long as our power lasts, the pro- 
letariat, feeding them, clothing them, convert- 
ing them, but suppressing them, so that we may 
be secure? Will we tyrannize the exceptional 
in art, in literature, in statesmanship, in pure 
thinking, freezing it by distrust, or exploiting 
it for sensation and reducing its fruits to vul- 
garity? Will we resolve religion into a social 
emotion and poetry to rhythmic prose? Must 
the poor fragments of the privileged classes 
that still remain, and the little shopkeepers, and 
the teachers with their hankerings after an in- 
tellectual aristocracy, and the skilled workman 
with the feverish zeal of a new convert to secur- 
ity still upon him — must they all unite with the 
industrial magnate in a holy alliance of things 
as they are to crush into uniformity a humanity 

i8i 



EVERYDAY AMERICANS 

where only rebels against our authority and the 
uncivilized remain? 

This would be the imperialism of the bour- 
geoisie. And neither our churches, which are 
rigidly bourgeois, nor our universities, which 
are ponderously bourgeois, and both trading in 
security, offer leadership that guarantees 
escape. 

Or will we attempt to federalize this world 
that apparently we have conquered, allowing 
autonomy for races of ideas, nations of cus- 
toms, and room enough for plantations of new 
desires in our fat fields ? Will we tolerate fine- 
ness, encourage variety, permit heresy, prepare 
for change ? It is said by way of compliment 
that here in America we have neither aristo- 
crats nor peasants. Will we preserve, or de- 
stroy, the peasant virtues, the ideas of the 
aristocrat, the desires of the intellectual. Will 
we make possible a nation where to be average 
is not the highest good ? 

I have no answer, naturally. There is no 
182 



THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 

reply that can now be formulated. But the so- 
lution is already present in the problem itself. 
It is to be found in men and women, in boys 
and girls especially, who will belong to the new 
order and who will answer in their time. If 
you wish to speculate upon what will become 
of the post-bellum American, whose traits as 
they exist to-day have been the subject of this 
book, study, on the one hand, the younger 
leaders in the labor parties, and on the other, 
the college undergraduates. In them lies the 
future. 



THE END 



183 



M lt> bb ^m 



